United States | Configuring the SMTP Journal Targets in Enterprise Vault 

Indrajit (Freddie) Bulsara - 26.09.202220220926

Configuring the SMTP Journal Targets in Enterprise Vault 

United States | Configuring the SMTP Journal Targets in Enterprise Vault 

You know what we’re all like at Insentra: We love to use our experiences and we LOVE a good blog article.  

Recently I was working on an Enterprise Vault (EV) consolidation and upgrade project when I came across the following error and thought it would be a great blog article to share: 

“The Enterprise Vault SMTP service received an email message that contains an unrecognized SMTP target address or invalid content. 

Internal Details: BadRecip – chan:smtp-external host:EXC HANGESERVER ip:XX.XX.XX.XX helo:EXCHANGESERVER sender:JOURNALMAILBOXADDRESS addr:DESTINATIONADDRESS reason:E-MTA-AddressFailed Address DESTINATIONADDRESS invalid: Unknown local user ‘DESTINATIONADDRESS’ “ 

The environment already had SMTP Journaling configured, whereby a journal rule in Microsoft 365 sends messages to a single journal routing address using a send connector. The send connector routes messages to a couple of smart hosts (i.e. EV SMTP Journal Archiving Servers). Any undeliverable messages get delivered to Non-Delivery Report (NDR) mailbox hosted in an on-premises exchange server. This is a stock standard implementation of M365 to on-premises journaling configuration.  

Up until EV Version 12.2, the only way to spread the archiving load over several journal archives and EV storage servers was to use address rewriting. Each address was configured as an SMTP target and every target was assigned to a different Journal Archive for load balancing. When the configuration was implemented using EV Admin (EVA) console it automatically created an alias file under Enterprise Vault installation folder\SMTP\DATA\etc\switch. The alias file was then edited to include an entry for incoming address to redirect address mapping.  

For this project, I used Server Settings Migration Wizard 14.0 to upgrade EV from 12.1 to 14.0. This tool produces a configuration package along with a very comprehensive report of the artifacts. The artifacts listed must be copied across to the new EV server where version 14.0 binaries are installed and ready to import into the configuration package. The artifacts include Vault Store Data, Index Locations, EV Server Cache, SMTP Holding folder, SMTP Message tracking log files folder, Storage Queue, SQL Database and updates to DNS entries.   

Unfortunately, the report will not tell you to copy the SMTP alias file from the switch folder mentioned above. Hence it is very easy to miss this step which will result in the error discussed earlier. Messages will get rejected by the SMTP service and will end up in the NDR mailbox. Resending messages out of the NDR mailbox is a challenge when thousands of messages can get rejected within a second.   

In EV version 12.3 onwards; rewriting is not required to spread the load. Instead, the Journal routing address can be configured with multiple archives and EV Storage servers. As per the EV SMTP Archiving criteria, this includes: 

  • If the target address is assigned to multiple archives, the task running on the server always archives to the archive local to the server.  
  • If multiple local archives are found on the server, the task chooses the archive which has the least number of items.  
  • If any of the local archives are not available due to temporary errors (such as storage is busy, the vault store is in backup mode, etc), the task chooses a remote archive which is assigned to the SMTP target address.  

In order to fix the issue, I created a single SMTP target using the Journal routing address and disabled all the old SMTP targets in EVA. The new SMTP target was assigned with two separate archives and storage servers. Rather than copying the alias file, it prevented encountering similar pitfalls in the future. Furthermore, this was a great opportunity to simplify the configuration and let EVs built-in features handle the load balancing act.   

I do recommend including a ‘check for an alias’ file and SMTP Journal reconfiguration steps as a separate task when performing an upgrade using the server settings migration wizard. This is not required if you are performing an in-place upgrade.   

I hope this article helps you understand the links between the new way of configuring SMTP Journal targets, addressing the migration wizard shortcomings and shows the steps you can take to avoid the error message I experienced not too long ago. 

If you need any help navigating EV, SMTP Journaling or our Email Archive Migration please contact us for a more in-depth discussion with one of our experienced consultants.  

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United States | Configuring the SMTP Journal Targets in Enterprise Vault 

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United States | Configuring the SMTP Journal Targets in Enterprise Vault 

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