Things you should know about the OfficeTalk Gateway Machine

Symptoms

A misconfigured OfficeTalk gateway computer can be responsible for behaviour such as

• missing e-mail messages
• message duplication
• misdelivered email messages
• server unresponsiveness

More Info

To configure OfficeTalk to be the mail gateway, select Supervisor mode and click Mail Services. Select your mail service and on the Host tab select Gateway machine. You can check the status of any client in the same way to ensure that they are NOT configured to be a mail gateway.

Detail

A gateway machine is responsible for connecting to the Internet and sending and receiving mail for the entire workgroup. All other OfficeTalk machines send and receive their mail to and from the workgroup database. Periodically, the gateway machine reads the outgoing messages from the workgroup database, connects to the Internet and sends the mail. Simultaneously, the gateway machine collects mail from all configured POP3 mailboxes or the specified SMTP server and distributes the mail to the appropriate OfficeTalk user.

Useful things you should know about the OfficeTalk mail gateway include:-

• One computer must be specified as the gateway machine so that e-mails can be sent and received externally from OfficeTalk.
• OfficeTalk must be running on the computer assigned as the mail gateway so that outgoing messages will be sent and incoming messages will be received.
• No more than one gateway machine must be specified as this can cause e-mail messages to be lost or misdelivered.
• The mail gateway role should be assigned to a computer dedicated to this purpose.
• It is normal for the gateway machine to appear unresponsive when processing email messages.
• The gateway machine should be logged in using a specific OfficeTalk user account created solely for this purpose. This will occupy one OfficeTalk user licence. OfficeTalk only allows a user to be logged on to one computer at a time on the network. When logging in to a second computer the first will be automatically logged out. For this reason it is not adviseable to log into the gateway machine using a normal user account.
• Clicking the ‘Check for new message’ button in Mail Mode on the gateway machine will cause OfficeTalk to deliver outgoing messages and to receive incoming e-mail. Clicking the ‘Check for new message’ button in Mail Mode on a normal OfficeTalk client will update the Inbox folder with messages that have already been received by the gateway machine.
• A schedule must be set for the OfficeTalk gateway to download e-mails automatically. This may be set in Supervisor Mode >> Mail Services >> [Your Mail Service] >> Connection Tab by clicking on the Connection Schedule button and adding a schedule.
• Setting a connection schedule to connect too frequently, if downloading a large amount of messages, will cause OfficeTalk to disconnect part way through the download and to download the same messages again. The connection schedule should allow enough time for all messages to be downloaded (but not necessarily decoded) before reconnecting again.
• It is generally accepted that e-mail is not suitable for sending attachments in excess of 5Mb in file size. For the purpose of transferring large files, protocols such as FTP should be used. Large messages might cause the gateway machine to appear unresponsive for large amounts of time, they might cause the database to grow significantly and they might create large temporary files. It is recommended that the Mail Service be configured not to download messages larger than 5Mb by setting this option on the Filtering tab of the Internet Service. It is also recommend that this limit be specified on the Mail tab of the security profile in Supervisor mode.
• If each user has their own POP3 account, then credentials need not be entered on the POP3 tab of the ‘Internet Service’. Instead, the credentials of each user should be entered into the POP3 tab found by selecting the Users tab, selecting the user account and clicking Settings. HOwever, if there is only one POP3 account then these credentials should be entered on the POP3 tab of the ‘Internet Service’ dialogue. (Note: In this particular case, OfficeTalk will use the ‘To’ field or ‘Received’ and ‘Envelope-To’ to determine for whom the messag