Where did the Badmail go in Exchange 2003 SP1?

by Bharat Suneja

In previous versions of Exchange, all mail that cannot be delivered ends up in the Badmail directory. This folder grows infinitely till it runs out of disk space!

E2K3 SP1 changes that. By default, SP1 will suck up all Badmail in a virtual blackhole – no bad mail accumulates.

Would you rather keep your Badmail? Can be changed with couple of registry settings.

Value: MaxBadMailFolderSize – this is the size in KB.

Under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\SMTPSVC\Queuing

If set to 0, badmail disappears. -1 reverts to pre-SP1 settings – accumulate till infinity. However, like circular logging, this doesn’t “rotate” messages – just collects messages till the max folder size is reached and then stops collecting more bad mail.

Value: BadMailSyncPeriod – specifies how often to check the Badmail folder (in minutes).

In addition to the above, there’s also a Badmail Archiving and Deletion script that can be used to archive messages in the Badmail directory.

With SP1 and above tools, it’s easy to maintain a “Badmail-free” Exchange environment, or at least control how big the Badmail folder gets.

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Anonymous March 6, 2007 at 3:14 pm

How do you enable this for Exchange 2007?

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