As a Novell employee I use GroupWise extensively. Being subscribed to a few dozen lists internally I use the Rules quite a bit as well to prevent excessive clutter in my Inbox. Instead I have a "folder" in my cabinet for each folder and move e-mails to the correct folder for each list so that I can keep working while everybody else in the company attempts to overwhelm me with thousands of e-mails per day.

Today an interesting question came in, though, regarding how to delete (or do something to) select e-mails without affecting all e-mails. The e-mail retention policy stuff that GW can do allows administrators to define a lifetime for e-mails before they are automatically removed (180 days, for example) but it applies to all e-mail and that's not what was desired. An example would be to have all of the e-mails I receive from my manager be deleted after a week (not the best example, admittedly, but it's what I can come up with on my own). Interestingly enough GroupWise rules allow this to be done in a couple different ways. First, the rule.

In the GroupWise client go to the Tools Menu and then the Rules option. Inside there create a new rule, name is something intuitive ("Delete my manager's e-mails after one week"), and then we'll tinker with the options available to us.

The initial tricky part is deciding when this rule should fire. The default time for rules to fire is when something is received as the 'event' is 'New Item'. Change this 'New Item' option to something like 'Startup' or 'Exit' which means the rule will fire when the client is started or closed, respectively. This may or may not apply to a WebAccess login; I'm just not sure and haven't found out yet.

With this done we next go to 'Define Conditions'. In this area change the first drop-down box to the 'Created' option which means to look at when something was created. Next change the condition to Before which is indicated by a less-than '<' symbol. Finally change the integer field to negative seven (-7) and leave the following drop-down on 'Today'.

Click on 'End' and change that to 'And' and add a line to filter based on the sender ('From') and enter your manager's e-mail address. Save everything, add an action of 'Delete/Decline' and enable the rule.

We have just created a rule that will fire when the client is started or closed and which will delete e-mails from the specified e-mail address after one week of use. You could also have this happen when entering or existing a folder though that means the rule will be processing more often.

While at first I did not think this would really be an option with the current GW client I was surprised and pleased to find the possibilities were extensive. Creating multiple rules for different conditions makes the automated maintenance of mailboxes trivial and simple for even beginning users.