Summary: Exchange Server’s security features maintain mailbox integrity, but monitoring message activity is sometimes necessary. The article explains accessing message tracking logs, essential permissions, and practical uses for resolving issues, analyzing statistics, forensics, and litigation support. For better recovery of deleted items, specialized software like Kernel for Exchange Recovery is recommended.
The Exchange Server’s robust security measures ensure the continuous integrity of mailboxes, maintaining a consistent state where incoming and outgoing emails are automatically sorted into their respective folders. Typically, managers are relieved from the burden of managing individual emails or monitoring mail flow. However, in exceptional situations, they may find it necessary to inspect message activity within the transport pipeline.
To streamline the process of monitoring mail flow, Exchange Server maintains a message tracking log accessible via the Exchange Management Shell. This log offers valuable insights, furnishing you with the following essential information:
Learn what happened to an email message that a user delivered to a certain recipient.
Determine if a transport rule, sometimes referred to as a mail flow rule, affected a message.
Check to see if a message that was delivered through the Internet made it into your Exchange organization.
Find every message that was sent by a certain user during a given time frame.
Important points to remember before checking the message logs in Exchange
The Administrator account must have additional permissions like Organization Management Role, Records Management Role, and Recipient Management.
The Microsoft Exchange Transport Log Search service must be active in order to search the message tracking logs. You cannot run delivery reports or check the message tracking logs if you disable or terminate this service. However, disabling this service has no impact on Exchange’s other functions.
The Get-MessageTrackingLog cmdlet cannot be used to search the message tracking log files copied from another Exchange server. Additionally, if you manually save an existing message tracking log file, the query logic that Exchange uses to search the message tracking logs is broken due to the change in the file’s date-time stamp.
Message tracking logs on Exchange 2013 Mailbox servers and Exchange 2010 Hub Transport servers in the same Active Directory site may be searched using the Get-MessageTrackingLog cmdlet in Exchange 2016. The message tracking logs on Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2013 Mailbox servers inside the same Active Directory site may be searched using the Get-MessageTrackingLog cmdlet in Exchange 2019.
How to run Get-MessageTrackingLog cmdlet in Exchange Management Shell?
After launching the Exchange Management Shell as the Administrator, you have several options for running the Get-MessageTrackingLog command.
The basic usage of the cmdlet is the following-
Get-MessageTrackingLog
It will bring the first 1000 recent message log entries from the single server.
For getting some specific entries from a specific time frame, you can input the cmdlet a little differently.
Message tracking logs can play a good part in solving different purposes of a business-
Resolving email delivery issues: message monitoring logs can provide you with information about why a message wasn’t delivered, if it arrived late, and more. Especially, it may create several issues like Exchange cannot open mailbox or show some specific errors.
Statistics: Every communication that passed via your servers is tracked in message tracking logs. How many messages were processed or who sent the most messages inside the firm are two examples of data that can be obtained relatively easily for analysis.
Forensics:Let’s say you don’t have an email backup, and someone deletes an email. Even worse, your rival firm received the email that included private information. Message monitoring logs can help you out in this situation by giving you some useful email-related information.
Litigation: similar to the preceding circumstance When a message tracking record is needed as evidence in court, it is frequently employed.
Conclusion
If you’re attempting to access message tracking logs for deleted messages and exploring methods for their recovery, it’s advisable to review the retention policies configured within your organization. However, relying solely on manual techniques for retrieving deleted messages may not yield satisfactory results. For more effective recovery of deleted and corrupted items, consider utilizing specialized software like Kernel for Exchange Server.
The software boasts a comprehensive recovery capability, effortlessly restoring emails, contacts, calendars, notes, and various other critical details. It seamlessly reinstates the lost items to their original positions, precisely where they resided before deletion. Its adaptive functionality ensures successful retrieval of deleted mailboxes in both Exchange 2010 and more recent iterations, offering a versatile and dependable solution.
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Updated On - September 26, 2023
