One of the more cool functions of GWAVA is the post office scan.

There are always viruses that we don't know about. If none of the anti-virus companies knows about it, it will sail past every scanner you have and plant itself neatly in your post office..... to wreak havoc at a future time.

That's where the post office scanner in GWAVA comes in VERY handy.

After not-too-long-we-hope, the anti-virus scanners will come to know about this virus and they will start protecting you from it.

The GWAVA post office scanner will look through your entire post office message store, armed with the knowledge of this virus.... and it will be detected and removed.

GWAVA not only protects you from real-time threats but now it can also protect you from threats you missed.

Here is how it works:

GWAVA itself (ver 3.6) is one NLM that does to major functions: collect mail at the MTA and scan the mail to see if it's good or bad.

The GWAVA POA scanner is exactly the same thing except that it collects mail from the post office and scans whether it is good or bad.

On the MTA side, it's simple enough - GWAVA connects to the MTA and every message that passes through gets checked by GWAVA. It's "real-time".

On the POA side, there is no real way yet to scan within the post office. So, scans are scheduled.

Within the GWAVA configuration program, you give the GWAVA POA scanner a trusted application key and then, when you schedule it, it will go through the post office and scan every message against the criteria you specify.

This is a key point of consideration: you don't necessarily want to scan the post office with the same filters you use for real time scanning.
When the mail is new, you want to determine whether it's good or bad. Once the message is in the post office, you're not so much concerned with whether the message is good but whether you missed something the first time.

My suggestion is to avoid the spam heuristics scan in the post office scanning. I say this because you generally have already checked for this and you have deleted the "gray area" messages. "the obvious" is not what might have gotten past you. You're looking for the sneaky. You're looking for viruses that were too new for the virus scanners when it passed the MTA scanner, for attachments that people within the post office should not have sent. Generally people won't spam within a post office; remember, you need large numbers for spam to work. If your post office contains a billion users, please send the success story to Novell!

So in the GWAVA config, you'll create a new configuration set and "switch to it" for configuration purposes. Once you're within the new "profile", you can begin setting things up the way you like.

You will configure it using the same available tests as you have with GWAVA MTA (or regular GWAVA). Just remember that you will be asking GWAVA POA to sweep through messages you already have in your post office and checking them.

WHat sorts of things will you check for? Common items are viruses, prohibited attachment types, content (obsolete for regular mail), large attachments - are people sending pictures, jokes or MP3's through the GroupWise system?

Then you decide what you want to do about it - will you archive it or delete it, will you notify anyone?

With your completed configuration, you only need to set up your schedule - when do you want it to run? I suggest the evening.

Use GWAVA Post Office scanner to catch what you might have missed during the MTA scanner. PLUS, you can scan for things WITHIN the post office - something that no perimeter based system can match.

A sample video will be available in another post.