As most GroupWise admins know, GroupWise Nicknames, while created actually long before Internet email was even widely available, have become the defacto standard for allowing users to receive mail with email addresses not generally tied to their userids or names.  As you know, out of the box GroupWise can support many different internet addressing methods such as:

• first.last@domain.com
• last.first@domain.com
• userid@domain.com
• flast@domain.com

These are only a few of the options, but all of these are available.

Sometimes sites need to allow an inbound name that has a dot in it.  For example, let’s say that the organization users first.last addressing and a user changes her last name.  The original email address might have been jane.doe@company.com, and now it is jane.smith@company.com.

Typically when a site is using userid@company.com, or even flast@company.com we just go and create a nickname of the previous name so that mail to the former id will not bounce.  However, GroupWise will not allow you to create a nickname of jane.doe – the dot in the nickname is not allowed.

All is not lost.  Simply create a nickname of jdoe, and give the nickname a first name of Jane and last name of Doe.  As long as your site is allowing first.last addressing schemes, jane.doe@company.com will continue to be a valid ID!

Happy GroupWising.