Message Archiving with Exchange 2000

It has now become very common for business owners to request the ability to see what messages their employees are sending and receiving, we will but the legal issues attachment to this to one side and discuss the in future articles, what we will look at here is how to implement “Message Archiving” in Exchange 2000. Message Archiving allows you to keep a copy of all incoming and outgoing messages on a per store basis.

The process of implementing Message Archiving is pretty simple compared with implementing Message Journaling which is the Exchange 5.5 equivalent.

1.       Open up the properties for the store that you would like to enable for Message Journaling (Figure 1)

Figure 1

2.       Check the “Archive all messages sent or received by mailboxes on this store” check box

3.       Click on the Browse button and choose the location that you would like the message journal to be recorded, this can be a mailbox or public folder, I would recommend having a public folder that is only visible to certain people.  By using a public folder you can also configure an age limit on the folder (Figure 2)

Figure 2

4.       For this example I created a public folder called “Message Journal”, I created a group called “Message Journal Admins” and gave them “Reviewer” access and set the access for the “Default” and “Anonymous” to be “None” and also cleared the “Folder Visible” check box (Figure 3)

Figure 3

So that is how you can implement Message Archiving with Exchange 2000, I would like to emphasis that it is important that you consult with a legal advisor before you implement Message Archiving, in certain industries it may be inappropriate or even illegal to put Message Archiving in place.

Companies should have a well defined Email policy that clearly states that certain members of the organization will have the ability to read all incoming and outgoing email, both internal and external.