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User Useage Tracking

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9 replies

by sgandenberger

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We are running Exchange 5.5 with Outlook 2000 as the mial client and we would like to track or log a single users e mail activities. I have poured through my Exchange manuals, and have not found a good way to do this. Ideally we would like to knowhow many messages are sent a day and to whom they are sent. Does anyone know how I can do this without sifting through logs? Our server handles over 1100 messages a day and I am afraid trying to mine logs for the info we need would be a huge task ans drain on the server resources.

9 replies

by timwalsh

The only way to do this within Exchange is to use the Message Tracking capability (Exchange Administrator | Tools menu | Track Message.

You can search for messages sent from a specific person, to a specific person, or both, over a specific time period (in number of 24-hr days).

Based on your parameters, you will be shown a list showing the time sent, size of message, # of recipients, and list of recipients. If you don't input parameters for either From: or Sent To:, you will receive a list of ALL emails sent during the time period specified. Unfortunately, this method provides no real logging capabilities.

This can obviously become a pain if you need to do this a lot. If you do have a requirement for this type of tracking/logging, you might want to consider soem of the third-party utilities that specialize in tracking user Internet/email usage. Be prepared as most of these utilities tend to be pricey.

by sgandenberger

Tim,

I tried this, but was unsuccessful, even after stopping and restarting the Internet Mail Service. When I asked the tracking program to "Find Now", it would act like it was searching the archive files, but it would return nothing to the screen. Could there be a setting or other configuration option I am missing? The "Enable message tracking" blocked is checked on the property page of the Internet Mail Service, what else could there be?

by brasslet

If you didn't have message tracking enabled previously, you won't see anything from the past.

Also, message tracking in the IMS won't show you everything the user sent or received, only messages that flow through the IMS. There is also a message tracking option in the MTA and IS that may help as well.

Another possibilty is using Message Journaling to a public folder. This is kind of messy, though, in that all messages from everyone gets written to the folder. You could sort of filter this by setting permissions to the public folder so only the user in question can write to it, but then you'll get events in your log every time another mailbox tries to write.

Yet another option is to get a third-party tool like Promodag, which I'm told does this kind of reporting very well. But. it'll cost ya.

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