Exchange 2003 ArchiveSink

Are you looking for out-of-the-box Exchange Server functionality that can help you satisfy corporate-policy or regulatory-compliance requirements? In "Exchange 2003 Advanced Journaling," May 2005, InstantDoc ID 45644 and "An Exchange 2003 Journaling Primer," April 2005, InstantDoc ID 45348, I outline the capabilities and operation of Exchange journaling, which you can use to capture messages that users on an Exchange database send or receive. However, Exchange journaling doesn't distinguish between internal and external messages. If you want more granular control over your archiving operations, consider using another native Exchange tool: Exchange Server ArchiveSink.

You can use ArchiveSink to selectively capture and store messages that are routed to specific groups of individuals. Ostensibly, ArchiveSink was created as a diagnostic tool, intended for use in troubleshooting message flow. But Microsoft enhanced the tool in Exchange Server 2003, and that version makes a handy "poor man's" email-archiving tool. Exchange 2003 implements the tool as a transport event sink that you can install on an Exchange 2003 server running Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3) or later, then configure to capture all or a subset of messages that pass through a specific SMTP virtual server or servers on that system. Email that requires local delivery (i.e., email from one user to another on the same server) still passes through an SMTP virtual server, so this type of email can be archived as well. There are no restrictions on the number of SMTP virtual servers that can participate in the ArchiveSink operation. . . .