Message Tracking In Exchange Server 2016
In this Article I am going to write about how to configure message tracking in exchange server 2016. I will discuss it using Exchange Management Shell Commands and Exchange Admin Center (EAC).
As you might know that Message tracking is very crucial administrative activity, with Message tracking admin can get the record for message forensics, reporting, mail flow analysis and troubleshooting.
This all can be done with the help of Message Tracking Log, it captures the detailed record of all activities such as flow of mail passing through the transport pipeline on mail server and Edge Transport server.
In order to manage the hard disk space, Exchange uses circular logging. With circular logging, it will limit the message tracking by removing the older entries.
How to Configure Message Tracking In Exchange Server 2016
The configuration of message tacking can performed with PowerShell cmdlet and EAC.
Using Exchange Management Shell
Admin can use Exchange Management Shell cmdlet on Edge Transport server and Mail server for message tracking. With the help of Set-TransportService cmdlet, admin can configure message tracking in Exchange Server.
For Instance,
For configuring message tracking with definite parameters:
- Server name ExMailbox
- The location of the message tracking log files to E:\Message Tracking Log.
- Size of a message tracking log file to 15 MB.
- Size of the message tracking log directory to 2.0 GB.
- Age of a message tracking log file to 30days.
How To Verify Successful Configuration Message Tracking Using PowerSell
To verify that message tracking has successfully configured, admin can run following command
Using EAC To Configure Message Tracking
- Open the EAC
- Go to Server >Servers and select the Mailbox server that admin want to configure
- Click Edit
- It will display server properties page, click Transport Logs. In the Message tracking log section, admin can change any of the following settings:
Enable message tracking log For tracking the messages on server, select the check box.
Message tracking log path The value admin will specify must be on the local Exchange server. If the folder doesn’t exist, it’s will be created when admin will click Save. - Click Save.
How To Get Message Tracking Log
Admin can get the message activity GetMessageTrackingLog cmdlet in Exchange Server that will results message tracking log consist message entries. It will give information regarding the messages that includes:
- What happened to a message that was sent by a user to a specific recipient.
- To find out the transport rule applied on a message.
- Information about the message received from an Internet sender to Exchange organization.
- To get information about the messages sent by a specific user during a specified time period.
For Controlled OutputAdmin can use following syntax for controlled output 
Using EAC For Message Tracking
Admin can get the delivery report with EAC. Delivery report is a message tracking tool that will searches the status of the message that were send from or to the organization Exchange. Admin can get the track of delivery information of the sent or received message.
How To Track The Message With EAC
- In the EAC, go to Mail Flow and click Delivery Reports.
- Mailbox to search Click on Browse to select the mailbox
- then click OK
Select one of the following:
For sent messages This option will search messages sent to specific users from the selected mailbox.
For received message This option will search the messages that are received by selected mailbox.
- When finished, click Search. If you want to start it again, click Clear.
Conclusion
This article write up is completely about how to configure message tracking in exchange server 2016. The method is described using Exchange Admin Center (EAC) and PowerShell commands too. In the last of this article I have also described about how to get message tracking log.
I hope that the above mentioned methods can help an exchange admin to configure message tracking in exchange server 2016.