Side Effects: Making Friends with your Exchange Server Administrator

I’m no Exchange Server expert, maybe there are some better built-in or downloadable
tools for doing what I describe here, but if you’ve loaded emails into a
relational database, as I’ve described previously, the following is extremely
simple. In arranging to get log files from the Exchange server I asked the
administrator if there was anything they wanted to know about that the logs
might reveal and, indeed there were: it turned out they wanted to know who was
sending the most email as storing it all was becoming more and more of a
problem. After trying a few different ways of reporting on the logs we settled
on the following: every time new logs were taken (about every 2 weeks) two
queries are run: the first extracts the top 100 sender-to-recipient traffic by
email count and the second extracts the same but by total message size (which
is why I capture it). Quite often the culprits were system accounts including
one that went a bit mad and sent 300,000 emails in 72 hours! Using these
reports the Exchange administrator has managed to work with development teams
to reduce the number of mails being generated by applications that it seemed no
one was reading.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *