Tracking Messages
You use the Message Tracking Center to follow a message's path in the logs. The Message Tracking Center is available as an Exchange 2000 snap-in that you can load into a customized console, but you typically access it from the ESM Tools node, as Figure 4 shows. When you open the Message Tracking Center, you can enter the criteria necessary to begin a search.
Obviously, the more information (e.g., sender, time sent, subject) you have about a message that you want to track, the better. Starting a search based on a fuzzy description of a message that a user thinks he or she sent 4 days ago to a group of people is much harder than looking for a message sent yesterday afternoon. Figure 4 shows the result of a search that has located one message that I sent to the specified user. Note that on this server, the Enable subject logging and display property isn't set, so message subjects aren't included in the message tracking logs and the Message Tracking Center can't display this information.
The Sender and Recipients buttons let you search Active Directory (AD) for users, contacts, or groups that sent or received the message. The Message Tracking Center won't begin a search until you provide valid sender and recipient data. By default, the Message Tracking Center assumes that you want to begin your search on the server that you select by clicking the Server button, but you can connect to another server to start searching if you need to (you'll need to if the sender's mailbox is on another server).
Even on large servers that handle heavy volumes of email, searching typically proceeds rapidly, yielding a result within a couple of minutes. When the Message Tracking Center must contact other servers to retrieve data (and especially when a message is addressed to a large distribution list—DL), it can appear unresponsive, but it will respond if you let it complete its processing.
In addition to introducing a better Message Tracking Center UI (which resembles Outlook's Find Message functionality), Exchange 2000 Service Pack 2 (SP2) makes an important architectural change to search processing. In versions earlier than SP2, the server performing the search contacts each server in a message's path, retrieves all the log data from the remote servers, then processes the search of the logs. In SP2 and later, the local server sends a search request to the Exchange Management Service running on each server involved in a message's progress. The service processes the search of the logs on that server (upgraded to SP2 or later) and returns only the relevant data to the requesting server.
The better the search criteria, the fewer the number of messages retrieved. The search in Figure 4 found only one message, so it's likely the one that I'm looking for. However, if the criteria are inexact, the Message Tracking Center might find 10 or more messages. In that case, you must decide which message is the one you want. To view comprehensive details about the progress of a message through the Routing Engine, select a message and double-click it.
Figure 5 shows a sample message history. In this instance, the history is reasonably simple because the message was sent to two SMTP recipients. The message subject isn't displayed, again because of server property settings. The history shows that after the message was sent (i.e., submitted from the Store), Advanced Queueing and the Categorizer (both components of the Routing Engine) processed it and determined that it should be delivered to a remote SMTP recipient. The Routing Engine then transferred the message to a server that hosts an SMTP connector so that the message could be sent to its final destination.
If you look at a message sent to users in other routing groups, you might see that the Routing Engine transfers the message to the Message Transfer Agent (MTA) for delivery to an X.400 recipient or to an Exchange 5.5 server. Or a message might use SMTP to go to a bridgehead server in the same routing group for onward transfer to other routing groups or, if your server hosts the routing group connector, directly to servers in other routing groups.
In situations in which messages are transferred to other routing groups, the Message Tracking Center lists destination bridgehead servers in a tree in the Location (left-hand) pane. As tracking proceeds, the bridgehead server tree expands to show all the servers within the routing group that receive a copy of the message.
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