7.1 How Retain Works with GroupWise Retention Services

GroupWise has a feature that can be enabled in its GroupWise Administration option called Retention Services.

When enabled, GroupWise prevents a user from emptying an item from Trash that has not yet been confirmed to have been archived. The way it does this is through a date/time field in each user database called the "digest retention time". It relies on third party archiving solutions like Retain to set that date/time, but GroupWise is the one that enforces it when set. What this does is it prevents any item newer than the date/time set in the "digest retention time" field from being emptied from Trash. This "digest retention time" is known in Retain as the "retention flag".

When Retain runs an archive job on a mailbox, it sets the digest retention time to the date/time of the newest/latest message it archived. However, if an error occurs on any item during that job which prevents Retain from archiving it or its attachment, Retain sets the digest retention time in the GroupWise user database for that mailbox to the date/time of the item that could not be archived due to an error.

And, even though Retain encounters an error on an item and cannot archive it, it moves beyond that item and continues to archive all other mailbox items; however, again, it doesn’t advance the retention flag past the date/time of the FIRST error it encountered. Thus, when the next archive job gets run on that mailbox, Retain checks the item store time set in its database of the user and uses that date/time as its starting time for the new job, minus one hour.

Example: If today is September 17, 2014 but an item in the previous job produced an error, could not be archived because of that error, and had a delivered date/time of September 15, 2014 09:15, then when today's job runs, it asks GroupWise for all items beginning with September 15, 2014 08:15 and on.

Now let's say that a month has passed and the problematic mail message has not been properly dealt with and we run a job. Even though Retain may have archived all items in the user's mailbox up to - let's say October 15th - it still starts the query with the item store time of September 15, 2014 08:15 because it could not advance the retention flag. If it were to do so, then the problem message would never get archived because Retain starts the query for items beginning with the digest retention time. Thus, if Retain were to advance the flag to the date/time of the newest/latest item it archived, then the problematic message would fail to fit within the query range and GroupWise would never send it to Retain.