Mailbox System Components

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The Mailbox contains a series of components and features such as the Dead Letter Mailbox, Mailbox Access Controls, and Document Publishing.

The system components and features of Mailbox are:

Component	Description
Mailbox	A storage area for business documents and provides an administrative hierarchy that is easy to manage and understand. System users have access to their documents, while administrators can organize and manage documents across all mailboxes. Mailboxes form a hierarchy. The top of the hierarchy is called the root mailbox and is denoted by a slash (/). Mailboxes can support sub-mailboxes. This organizational concept is referred to as a mailbox hierarchy.
Dead Letter Mailbox	Stores messages that cannot be added to a particular mailbox. The primary role of this mailbox is to provide temporary data storage until the administrator can correct the problem.
Message	A document existing in a mailbox. A message is assigned to a mailbox with a name and timestamp. Mailboxes are acted upon by business processes using services, which provide the ability to add, extract, query, and delete messages.
Mailbox Access Controls	Enables the system administrator to assign mailbox privileges to groups and users. Users who have the appropriate permissions in a mailbox can view, add, delete, and extract messages from the mailbox (using the Mailbox Browser Interface) and can run business processes acting upon the mailbox.
Global Permission Settings	Mailbox Administrators, by default, have global privileges that enable the execution of operations across all mailboxes. The Mailbox Global Delete and Mailbox Global Query permissions are two such global privileges. For example, a Mailbox Administrator can delete a mailbox because they have the permission Global Mailbox Delete. When necessary, Global permissions can be granted to other users and groups.
Mailbox Virtual Roots	A mailbox associated with a trading partner. Every mailbox referenced by that user is evaluated relative to that user's virtual root. For example, if the user's virtual root is /Customers/Central/Dallas Hardware and the user runs an action to add a message to mailbox /Inbound, the actual mailbox designated by the action will be /Customers/Central/Dallas Hardware/Inbound. With the virtual root defined there is no need to notify this trading partner when a change is made to the hierarchy - as long as the administrator updates the trading partner's virtual root.
Mailbox Browser Interface (MBI)	Enables Internet users to access their mailboxes from a standard Web browser. Users can send messages to, retrieve messages from, and search messages in any mailbox for which they have permissions. The MBI also enables users to change their account password. The Mailbox Browser Interface is a Web system, and therefore requires only a Web browser. No proprietary client software is required.
Scheduled Batch Processing	Documents are collected from internal systems and external trading partners. All documents are processed together on a schedule, such as at the end of the day or week. For example, in Automated Clearing House (ACH) handling in the banking industry, messages containing transactions are received during the course of a day and placed into one or more mailboxes. At the end of the day, all transactions are processed. Same-bank transactions are processed internally. Transactions with other banks are sent out for processing.
Asynchronous Document Processing	A hub may provide a trading partner with an inbound mailbox. The trading partner may submit documents containing EDI transactions to that mailbox, where the document is processed. Each submission is processed one time. For example, an electronics supplier wants to process purchase orders as soon as they arrive. The electronics supplier instructs its trading partners to send purchase orders to a mailbox. When orders arrive, a business process extracts the order from the mailbox and passes it to a back-end system for order processing.
Document Publishing	Documents, such as a product catalog, may be published using a mailbox. Authorized trading partners retrieve the document using a browser-based, secure interface. After a period of time, the document expires and is no longer available for retrieval. The following scenarios illustrate ways to publish documents to a mailbox. A hardware supplier publishes a price list for a sale to their trading partners. The hardware supplier places the price list in a mailbox and grants trading partners access to the mailbox. The price list can be extracted (downloaded) until the end of the sale. An insurance company publishes a document of all claims processed for its clients of the past year. The company adds the claim detail to the mailboxes of the individual clients and allows clients to extract claim details for one year.
File Copying	Files can be copied to and from the Mailbox through the Sterling Connect:Direct Server adapter or the FTP Server adapter.
Routing Rules	Initiate action automatically when a message is added to a mailbox.