12.1 Understanding the Purpose of Post Offices

The post office serves as an administrative unit for a group of users and mailboxes.The following diagram illustrates the logical organization of a GroupWise domain with multiple post offices. The two post offices belong to the domain. All of the objects under each post office belong to that post office.

GroupWise Domain with Multiple Post Offices

As illustrated above, each post office must have a Post Office Agent (POA) running for it. The POA delivers messages to users’ mailboxes and performs a variety of post office and mailbox maintenance activities.

Physically, a post office consists of a set of folders that house all the information stored in the post office. The post office folder contains user mailboxes and messages, as well as other vital information. For an overview, see Section 14.3, Information Stored in the Post Office.