Disposal Actions

A disposal action specifies the principal action the Gateway performs on an email message. It determines whether the message is delivered, dropped (deleted), non-delivered, relayed to a server, or held in a message area.

• Each policy route specifies a default disposal action to apply to messages that do not trigger a content rule, for example, deliver the message.
• Each content rule can specify disposal actions to use if the rule detects a violation. If more than one of these content rules specifies a disposal action, the Gateway performs the disposal action(s) of the highest priority content rule. You can use dual disposal actions to test your policy.

  A content rule that detects and acts on a violation is a content rule that is invoked on a message and whose What to Look For? conditions are met. Content rules are prioritized within a policy route according to the order in which they are listed.

The Gateway includes the following disposal actions that you can use to either deliver or delete detected messages. You cannot edit or delete these disposal actions:

• Deliver the message

  Deliver the message to the recipients.

• Drop the message

  Delete the message.

• Non-deliver the message

  Delete the message and send a non-delivery report to the sender.

If you select the Deliver the message disposal action, the following additional options can be selected:

• Applying encryption endpoint policy.
• As specified on the route.
• In the clear.

The Applying encryption endpoint policy option can be used to conditionally apply encryption using a content rule: it overrides the route setting. For more information, see Encrypt email using a mail policy content rule.

Administrators with the appropriate permissions can create two types of disposal action:

• You use Message Area disposal actions to hold detected messages in specific areas. You can monitor these areas and delete or release trapped messages.
• You use Relay Server disposal actions to route messages to a specified server on a named port. As it is often necessary to archive the original version of a message rather than a version modified by the policy engine, you can specify whether the relay server should receive the modified or original copy of the message.

The Gateway has two system message area disposal actions, which cannot be deleted. The system message area disposal actions are:

• Hold in "Message Processing Failure" area

  Hold the message in the Message Processing Failure message area.

• Hold in "Problem Messages" area

  Hold the message in the Problem Messages message area.

The supplied system also includes a number of message area disposal actions for use with the starter policy. You can use these disposal actions in your content rules or you can create new message area disposal actions to use.

You can configure message areas to release messages according to a schedule that you define to use bandwidth efficiently. For example, you can:

• Hold oversize messages in a message area, and deliver them in off-peak times.
• Hold bulk mailout messages in a message area, and limit the number of messages released each hour.
• Apply a scheduled time-delay to the release of outbound messages from a message area.

Managing Disposal Actions

Disposal action management is controlled separately from where the action is applied. This allows you to configure when messages expire, are released, who is notified and when, as well as creating new message areas or deleting existing ones. You can also manage relay server configuration. For more information, refer to The Manage Disposal Actions page.