OSB Email Transport polling in multi cluster environment

Question

Hi,
I have following scenario: email needs to be read by OSB proxy using the Email transport. The proxy service service will poll the IMAP mail box and processes messages, upon reading a message message is deleted.
The email transport works fine in a cluster environment by using a dedicated managed node for polling, so no duplicate messages will occur.
However, we have two clusters in our environment pointing to one mailbox. In this case, two clusters have no visibility of each other. So, two pollers may poll the same mailbox.
Please, advice if there any configuration on OSB, Weblogic or IMAP can be done to solve this issue.
thanks,
Djail

Answer 1

Dont think it will work in an Active-Active setup. If you have both clusters listening to same email address then both will receive a copy (just like you receive same email on your desktop's email client and also on your mobile's email client) because SMTP servers distribute to clients similar to how a JMS Topic works.
Dont know if there is a setup in IMAP which will allow an email to be sent to only one client (in this case one of the OSB clusters).
If you want to make it work in Active-Active then you will need to do it at functional level, for ex. after receiving an email if you have any unique id then log that in a transaction table, before calling the backend, check if the same email was already processed by the other cluster. Alternatively, check at the backend before processing it.