Simon Barratt

MS Exchange 2003 - Day 4

Today, we covered setting up mail routing.  Not too much to this as you would expect.  Exchange uses SMTP be default to route emails from server to the next, so if your firewall permits they could all send straight to the Internet.  Alternatively you can create routing groups (which equate to NNN).  Like NNN's any server within the routing group can send/receive without further instruction, and then you create connections from one routing group to another to enable email flow.  A nice touch was that the admin client asked if you wanted to create a return connection automatically for you, saving you from doing in manually.  Once your routing groups are defined, you will probably want to control how email gets sent to the Internet.  This is achieved by creating an SMTP connection to * (Just like Domino).  Once in place you can then place controls on the connection to limit people/groups using it.  However restricting who can send Internet email doesn't work without reading KB# 277872 first.  This article explains what hacks you have to do to get it to work as expected.

You can create multiple SMTP connectors if desired, so that you can enforce specific requirements for email to certain domains.  For example you may want to enforce TLS based connections to some domains for confidentiality purposes

When connections come and go, due to network problems, the connectors should manage by themselves, but another bug needs negotiating and Google'ing 'glitch retry state' will retrieve the MS technote on the subject.

In this release relaying is disabled by default - Good!

The claimed support for mobile devices, is not all it is cracked up to be.  It is not even looking at in the current release.  MS have indicated that with SP2 things will improve.  We should continue to make successful use of the Intellisync solution.  It is not worth modifying your AD by importing LDIF definitions for every potential mobile phone carrier we use around the world.

Next we moved on to Disc requirements.  First piece of advice is not too enable circular transactional logging.  Otherwise you may loose data, in the event of a failure.  Sounds like a good piece of advice.

As Exchange will only utilise 3GB max, there is no need to put more than 4GB in the server.  You then should read KB#815372 and set the registry parameters for servers > 3GB.  You will also want to modify the Store Database Cache with ADSI edit to elicit the best performance from you boxes.

You could almost sense the relief in the room when we reviewed how to restore lost email.  First off, you can decide how long messages are kept even after being removed from the trash, thus allowing users to recover emails they think they have lost - not sure how big a deal this is really.  If you delete a message, and it sits in your trash for 1 week, then it is pretty clear to me that the email is not needed.

Next came 'how and administrator would restore a mail database or a specific mailbox'.  You need to be using a backup product that uses the Exchange backup API's and can manage your logs for you.  Once in place, it is pretty simple to restore a mail store, but restoring a mail store will reset all the users mail boxes in the store back to the recovered point  Not much use if you are trying to restore just a single message, from a single mailbox.  For this they have introduced Mailbox recovery.  You still have to restore the entire mail store, so make sure you have plenty of disc, but now you get the option of either merging the current mailbox with the live mailbox, or to place the restored copy of the mailbox in a folder in the users mailbox (effectively doubling the size of the users mailbox.  No matter how you look at this, you are going to need plenty of temporary disc space.  The merge concept sounds nice, but I will have to see it in operation first.  The 'entire copy in a folder' seems a bit extreme though.

The other guys thought this was great progress, so I will have to take their word on it!  Either way, it is still more complex than we are currently used to!

kb#883419