In preparing these tips, I like to peruse Microsoft’s public
Exchange forums so I’m providing you with tips that actually address real-world
problems. In the past month, many folks have asked questions that ultimately
related to Exchange’s message journaling feature. In one case, the poster
wanted to know how he would go about having incoming mail for all six of his
employees also sent to his inbox. In a second message, the poster’s manager
suspected that an employee was seriously abusing her personal e-mail privileges
and then covering her tracks, and management wanted proof so they could take
appropriate action. In both cases, the posters were pointed to information
regarding Exchange’s journaling feature, which allows an administrator to
record all e-mail communication in an organization. Exchange journaling can
also help an organization grapple with various regulatory requirements.

Exchange provides for three kinds of journaling:

  • Message-only
    journaling: Creates a copy of all incoming and outgoing messages and “P2”
    message headers (contains the message recipient data that the sender
    specifically declared) to the recipients on messages in a specified
    database. The message copy is sent to a journaling mailbox that you
    specify. Message-only journaling does not capture BCC, recipients from
    rule-based forwarding, or recipients declared as a result of the expansion
    of a distribution group name.
  • BCC
    journaling: BCC-journaling is similar to message-only journaling, but
    includes BCC recipients and other recipients known to the source server.
  • Envelope
    journaling: Envelope journaling is the most complete and includes P1
    header information (which includes address information used to actually
    route mail). As such, all recipient information is also captured.

Tips in your inbox

Delivered each Monday, TechRepublic’s free E-mail Administration NetNote provides tips that will help you manage your Exchange server and other e-mail systems.

Automatically sign up today!

As you might expect, journaling does result in a performance
hit on your Exchange servers. While you need to run real tests to determine how
your servers will respond, Microsoft estimates that journaling can result in a
performance hit of anywhere between 15% and 35%.

Microsoft normally supports journaling only on a
mailbox-store basis. However, there are also ways, by using event sinks, that
you can enable journaling just for specific users in your organization. For
details on achieving this, look to
this article.

For more information regarding enterprise-level journaling, take
a look at this article on Microsoft’s site.