By Bryan Keadle

We have determined that much of our total GroupWise storage is due to attachments that are left in users' mail boxes. Many of these attachments are dated and can be buried in a user's Cabinet folder for reference, or still exist as Sent or Trashed item. We can significantly reduce our GroupWise storage space without resorting to global policies to delete or archive messages if we could identify these messages with attachments for the users, and provide them with a report of the messages with attachments and request that they "clean house".

Though the GWCheck program provided by GroupWise does give the ability to report on mailbox statistics, and find this information, the resulting log does not lend itself to be imported into a spreadsheet or database for reporting purposes.

This utility program, GWAttachmentStats.exe, parses out a GWCheck report generated to report attachment statistics. With an options file defined like this:

Where we are reporting on all messages with attachments larger than 3 MB, it will process the resulting log file into 2 tab-delimited files, SUMMARY.TXT and DETAIL.TXT, which is then easily imported into Excel for reporting purposes. The SUMMARY.TXT gives mailbox statistics for each user, and the DETAIL.TXT provides the information about the messages containing attachments that meet the GWCheck report criteria. We take this:

And turn it into this:

UPDATE: 07-2007

Version 3.0 update:

This newest version is exponentially faster than the original, and can now handle very large gwcheck log files. Features of this version include:

- Handles large log files (tested against 200 MB gwcheck logs)

- You now have a dialog box on launch to select Summary and/or Detail

- Window title shows start time, and when complete, elapsed time

- Process multiple log files at the same time

- The resulting summary and detail reports now include the PO name processed:

 (ReportType)_(PO)_yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm.txt
    e.g.:
        Summary_PO-name_2007-06-15-14-07.txt  (started at 2:07pm)
        Details_PO-name_2007-06-15-14-07.txt (started at 2:07pm)

- Excel import now creates a single workbook, with a separate Summary and Detail worksheet tab, formatted, and column totals generated. Subsequent processed files will be added as additional worksheets (gwattachmentstats.xls)

This version of GWAttachmentStats does require Microsoft's LogParser program/utility. Logparser.exe needs to be located in your search path. Thanks to this excellent, *FREE* utility, what originally took over 40 hours to process a 200MB gwcheck log file now takes a mere 10 minutes (3 minutes for just the summary report)!

Additionally, if you use my companion program, GWPUDBInfo.exe, you can generate a PUDBIndex log file which will translate the pu*.db UserIDs to the originating owner of that "mailbox". Here's what you do:

1. Run GWPUDBInfo.exe against the same PO that you are reporting on with GWAttachmentStats

• Make sure the resulting log file, PUDBIndex_(PO name).txt , exists in the same directory as the GWCheck log file you created for GWAttachmentStats to process

• Run GWAttachmentStats, and select the PO GWCheck log file. If it finds this index file that matches the PO name you're processing, it will use it to translate the pu*.db references in the SUMMARY report, like this:

Thanks to Laurie Baker for her patience, feedback, and willingness to test this update against her quite large gwcheck log files (200 MB).

This feedback is what this tool is all about! -

"... we have no size limits in place. We are trying to find out exactly how big people's mailboxes are since we are moving to an environment where they will not only have limits, but be charged for the size of their mailbox. So your tool is key for us to come up with as accurate as possible projections of cost in order to encourage them to delete."

Now we can easily report, sort, and trend on user's email statistics, mailbox sizes, and space taken by attachments!

As a matter of policy, we would request that users save out email attachments that are important, and delete them from their mailbox. Alternatively, there is a handy Formativ Applet by Advansys that allows you to delete the attachment from a message, without deleting the message.

Click here for GWCheck and supporting files.

For you convenience, included in the download package is a GWCheck options file template to get you started. Simply:

1. Run GWCheck.exe

• Selected the provided options file template

• change the path to the post office and the po name (and optionally the log file name and attachment sizes parameter) and select Run