Summary:
This technote supplements the MMS Admin Guide regarding the definition and use of policies.

Symptom:
You are having problems defining or using MMS policies.

Detailed Information:
- The key about applying policies is to understand that they operate on user and domain records, which are added by you to the policy directory, and must be unique.

- A user record represents an email address (and possibly aliases), and a domain record represents an email domain.

- By default, your Internal folder contains a domain record for your company, and the External folder contains a domain record called "Default Domain", representing all companies outside on the Internet.

- When MMS processes an email, it first checks the From and To addresses against any matching user record (anywhere in the policy directory), and if none is found, against a matching domain record (anywhere in the policy directory), and if none is found, MMS uses the Default Domain.

- Once MMS has identified a matching user or domain record, it applies all policies in effect on that record, whether defined explicitly on the record, or inherited from the folder structure above the record.

- The thing to remember is that it does not matter what you name the folders in the policy directory -- the folder names are irrelevant to MMS, and are there for your organizational purposes only; e.g., you could rename the Internal folder to "X" and the External folder to "Y", and the functionality of these directories would not change.

- What matters is what user or domain records match the From and To addresses in the email (matching the From address applies all sender-type policies in effect on the user or domain record, and a matching To address applies all recipient-type policies).

- There are always at least two ways to accomplish the same thing in the directory; e.g., you can have a recipient policy on your Internal folder, to process emails coming into your company, or you can have an equivalent sender policy on the External folder, accomplishing the same thing, because of the Default Domain record.

- So, the thing to remember is: where are my user and domain records relative, not to the folder names, but relative to the folder and policy inheritance structure.

Original Author: GKOSTRUBA
Original Submitter: GKOSTRUBA
Keywords: policy directory user domain record inherit MMS ID#26958