Exchange - Public Folder Journaling of a fashion
I’m back, been very busy on a project implementing 2 new EMC CX4’s and Symantec Enterprise Vault so not had a lot of time to write any blog posts. However I’ve got a fair bit of content to put out there from my Symantec EV implementation which should hopefully help others in the same boat.
The first one I’d like to write about is Public Folder Journaling. The company I work for have over 1,500 mail enabled public folders, the majority of which appear to have been auto-created when we were on Exchange 5.5. The first major problem I faced was the fact that Exchange 2003 does not support the journaling of mail enabled public folders. For Compliance reasons it was essential to capture these emails so I had to come up with a suitable solution.
I came up with the idea of forwarding all mail enabled public folders to a mailbox, thus allowing it to be captured by the exchange journaling and then sucked up into the Symantec Enterprise Vault product. But I had the small matter of identifying which public folders were being actively used for email. Then the task of finding them within the public folder hierarchy, on top of that I needed to manually apply the forwarding address setting.
This was going to take weeks to complete! So I decided on a blanket approach and looked at adding the forwarding address to all 1,500 public folders. I figured that if the mailbox was in use then the mail would be captured, if it wasn’t then no damage done. But how exactly do you change the settings of 1,500 public folders?
ADModify to the rescue! For those of you unfamiliar with ADModify it’s a great little tool for doing bulk changes to Active directory objects and their attributes, you can find more information on Technet here. In this case I wanted to change two values, the ones relating to the forwarding mailbox and the check box so that the message would be delivered to both locations.
So I did the following, used ADModify to bring up a list of all mail enabled public folders. I used the custom LDAP Query option within ADModify and used the query (&(objectClass=PublicFolder)(Mail=*).
I selected 3 public folder objects to test with before doing all of them of course. Once selected click next and you will be presented with a screen very similar to normal active directory so you can change one of the many common attributes and AD object has.
So I navigated to the Exchange General Tab and added the full path canonical path to the user object I’d setup with the mailbox, “PFCapture”
The check box attribute was a little trickier as it wasn’t shown in ADModify, after much searching with ADSI Edit I found it was a Boolean value called deliverandredirect. So I went to the custom tab and entered the attribute name and the value TRUE so it would put a tick in the check box.
I applied these changes and after a little waiting for replication, etc the new attributes appear when examining the objects in ADSI Edit. Emails sent through to the original addresses found their way to my new PFCapture mailbox and when searching within the Symantec product I can see the emails have been captured for compliance purposes.
So now on to the next problem, how do I automate the clearing down of the PFCapture mailbox so it doesn’t just grow and grow? Well Exchange 2003 has a handy feature called mailbox management policies and with this you can control what happens to the messages within mailboxes.
The full instructions on how to set this up can be found in Microsoft Article 319188. In summary I set up this policy and changed it so any email in any folder within the mailbox was deleted immediately after 1 day. I then configured the mailbox management process on the server properties (Within Exchange System Manager) to run at midnight each day of the week. This keeps the mailbox light on space utilisation without any manual intervention, which is always a good thing.
So there we have it, a crudely fashioned means of journaling mail enabled public folders. Any questions please just drop me a comment and I’ll get back to you.
