Novell Doc: GroupWise 7 Installation Guide - GroupWise Internet Agent Overview

4.1 GroupWise Internet Agent Overview

The Internet Agent allows communication between GroupWise users and users of other messaging systems who send e-mail across the Internet. The Internet Agent picks up inbound e-mail messages from the Internet, converts them from RFC-822 or MIME format to the GroupWise message format, and then passes the converted messages to the GroupWise Message Transfer Agent (MTA).

For outgoing messages to the Internet, the GroupWise MTA passes the messages to the Internet Agent, which then converts the messages to Internet messaging format, and then sends them to the designated Internet addresses.

Figure 4-1 GroupWise Internet Agent Connecting a GroupWise System to the Internet

Choose from the following list of topics to learn more about the capabilities of the GroupWise Internet Agent.

SMTP/MIME Service

The SMTP/MIME service in the Internet Agent allows you to send and receive e-mail with standard encoding on attachments, international character sets, and multipart messages. Multimedia e-mail with images, sound, and video can also be exchanged. The service also includes these additional features:

SMTP Dial-Up Service: The Internet Agent includes SMTP dial-up functionality. This can be useful when your system does not meet the requirements of a dedicated Internet connection, or when you prefer not to have a permanent Internet connection. With the SMTP dial-up feature, you can establish a schedule to periodically check the message store without maintaining a permanent link.
Flexible Addressing: The Internet Agent offers full GroupWise addressing support, including system groups, nicknames, and individual users.

The Internet Agent also takes advantage of GroupWise Internet addressing, which allows inbound messages addressed in a variety of formats to be delivered to GW users. These formats include:
```
UserID@Internet_domain_name
UserID.PostOffice@Internet_domain_name
Last_Name.First_Name@Internet_domain_name
First_Name.Last_Name@Internet_domain_name
First_Initial_Last_Name@Internet_domain_name
```
Internet Users in the Address Book: Internet users can be added to the GroupWise Address Book so users won’t have to remember long Internet addresses.
Real-Time Blacklists: Many organizations, such as Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS*), Open Relay DataBase (ORDB), and SpamCop*, provide lists of IP addresses that are known to be open relay hosts or spam hosts. You can use the real-time blacklists provided by these sites to protect your users from offensive spam.
Spam Protection: Anti-spam services use different indicators to mark potential spam. One might use a string of asterisks; the more asterisks, the greater the likelihood that the message is spam. Another might use a numerical value; the higher the number, the greater the likelihood that the message is spam. You can configure the Internet Agent to recognize as spam whatever indicators your anti-spam service uses and flag such messages for processing by the client Junk Mail Handling feature.
Accounting: The accounting feature provides inbound and outbound tracking of messages passing through Internet Agent. This lets administrators track how the Internet Agent is being used. GroupWise Monitor includes a Gateway Accounting report that organizes information gathered in Internet Agent accounting files into a format that is visually easy to read.
DNS Name Resolution: The Internet Agent can access a DNS server directly to resolve host names to IP addresses, or it can rely on a relay host to perform the name resolution.
Connect to Other GroupWise Systems Through the Internet: Using passthrough addressing, you can connect to other GroupWise systems anywhere on the Internet and have access to all of the GroupWise features. The Internet simply becomes a mail transport medium for GroupWise.

POP3 Service

The POP3 service in the Internet Agent allows you to download messages from your GroupWise post office to a POP3 client application such as a Web browser’s e-mail program or a Telnet application. The Internet Agent acts as the POP3 server, providing a TCP connection between the user’s GroupWise post office and a POP3 client. Accessing the GroupWise post office via the Internet Agent’s POP3 server capability, users can retrieve their e-mail messages and manage them through user ID login options.

IMAP4 Service

The GroupWise Internet Agent supports the Internet Messaging Access Protocol 4 (IMAP4). As an IMAP4 server, the Internet Agent allows IMAP4-compliant e-mail clients to read and manipulate GroupWise messages.

LDAP Services

The Internet Agent supports the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory standard with LDAP server capability that allows access for directory searches of GroupWise post offices. Using LDAP Public Access, Internet mail clients can do lookups on GroupWise users and address information.

iCal and iMip Services

The Internet Agent supports iCalendar (iCal), the Internet Calendaring and Scheduling core object specification (RFC 2445), and iMIP, the iCalendar Message-based Interoperability Protocol (RFC 2447). When a GroupWise user sends an appointment to an external Internet user, the Internet agent converts the appointment into an iMIP message that can be read and accepted or declined in compatible e-mail systems such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. GroupWise users can also receive and accept or decline appointments from users of these e-mail systems. Accept/decline notifications are also exchanged between systems.

Secure Connections via SSL

The Internet Agent supports the use of SSL for its connections to SMTP hosts, POP3 clients, IMAP4 clients, and Internet Agent Web console.

Access Control

The Internet Agent program includes security capabilities called Access Control that allow administrators to control user access to all services (SMTP/MIME, LDAP, POP3, and IMAP4). Access Control can help you reduce costs and provide added security.

With the SMTP/MIME service, Access Control can be used to block messages being sent to or received from specific host or IP addresses.

Multiple Threading

Multiple threading allows more than one send or receive process to be running concurrently. You can configure the number of threads to enhance the speed and performance of the Internet Agent. The number of thread switches are set separately for the SMTP/MIME service, POP3 service, IMAP4 service, and LDAP service.

SNMP-Compliant

The Internet Agent can be managed by any SNMP-compliant network manager, such as the alarm management features of Novell ZENworks® Server Management.

SMP Support (NetWare Only)

The NetWare Internet Agent supports Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP), letting it take advantage of a server with multiple processors.