Last week I was called by a customer who apparently was in a big panic and needed help asap. What happened?

An employee had set up a vacation rule which auto-replied on every single e-mail coming into her mailbox. No problem there, but she also had setup a 'Return Notification' for all outgoing emails. Remember that feature only under Tools, Options, Send, Send Options, Mail, Return notification. YES! Exactly, that's the one :-)

When an e-mail came into her mailbox, it was auto-replied to both external but also internal users. For those users a delivery notification was send back which was then replied upon again, after which .... got it? ;-)

The effect was a big ping-pong battle on the POA sending messages back and forth between several mailboxes. I'm not sure what else was in the mix here, because I never got the exact details about what she did there, but fortunately they already bought GWAVA's Vertigo a couple of weeks ago and that one was still up and running on the Administrator's desktop.

Of course, because of the infinite loop here, the GroupWise system became very slow and was almost brought to its knees because the POA had to process a lot of messages. But when they finally could login into that specific mailbox from within GWAVA Vertigo, only one mouse click was needed to disable the looping rule which was causing the issue. And all the POA then had to do was to process the queue of all those messages which were waiting to be delivered.

I have heard about many rule loop issues, but this one was new to me. My own famous mistake was one where I created a loop between two GroupWise 5.5 systems which were connected through a X400 network which cost the government in the Netherlands a fortune at the time to use. So when we found a way to manage rules with GroupWise 7, we immediately were thinking about all those rule related issues in the past.

GWAVA Vertigo allows you to do a couple of very cool things regarding rules:

- enable/disable or delete rules per user or for multiple users
- copy out rules from a source mailbox to one or multiple target mailboxes
- make reports on rules in PDF, Excel or Text and print them out when needed. You're able to filter and/or group on every detail of a rule

But there's so much more. Just have a look yourself. Check out the latest GWAVA Vertigo evaluation version, click 'Try' in the right menu, all you need to do is register. The demo version is full featured, no limitations there apart from the fact that it expires at the end of the month.

GWAVA Vertigo is changing the 'Roels' ... I mean Rules ;-)