Compliance Archiving–Fixes

This week at ExchangeDefender the development team has been split across two areas of focus. We have been working hard on finishing the new Essentials platforms and attempting to smooth out the registration process. However, most of the work this week has been put into existing products and resolving several bugs that surfaced last week.

The product that received the most code corrections/enhancements this week was Compliance Archive.

We’ve addressed two issues with Compliance Archive this week and the code changes have been working without any issues. The first issue was relatively simple and was discovered because of extensive growth of mailbox storage sizes. To resolve this, we implemented a few methods on the front end to allow mailboxes with over 10k messages to render correctly. The second issue was directly related to improper use of the Compliance Archive system and the message retrieval process.

First let me explain how the system is supposed to work, and then I’ll explain the problematic area we found.

How It Works

Compliance Archive works by processing mail that is captured inside of a Journal Mailbox. A Journal Mailbox is essentially a rule based mailbox that will retain an instanced copy of all messages sent/received globally across the desired domain or accounts. These archived messages contain very basic information and retain the attached “original” message file. This allows our software to analyze this information, process the message and store the original message file inside of our database.

 

What Was Happening?

After checking into a few accounts that had complaints of mail not getting archived, we noticed something… They had a handful of legitimate message, but they also had a lot of invalid messages. What had happened was, these individuals were treating the journal accounts like regular mailboxes and sending messages to them directly. In many cases they had even configured them as Catchall accounts or added them to several Distribution Groups. By sending the messages to the journal account in this manner was causing the Compliance Archive operations to fail, because the messages had an incorrect structure.

 

Solution

Since these messages were injected into the mailboxes through an improper method, they are NOT messages that yield the validation to be archived. So we implemented methods to compare the structure types and simply remove these invalid messages from the system. After implementing these changes it allowed the archiving process to resume normal operation. Within a couple hours archive queues that were over 20k, were completely caught up within a few hours.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com