Veritas Enterprise Vault™ Setting up SMTP Archiving

About SMTP Journaling

Figure: Example of SMTP Journaling

Typically within an organization, SMTP messages are delivered to user mailboxes by one or more MTAs. The MTAs are usually Exchange Servers, or SMTP servers. You configure these MTAs to journal or BCC a copy of each message to an Enterprise Vault SMTP routing address, for example, journal1@ev.example.com.

In Enterprise Vault you configure the routing addresses as SMTP targets, and associate each target address with an archive. In the SMTP target properties, ensure that the target address is enabled for archiving. The check box, Archive messages sent from or received by this SMTP address, must be selected to enable a target address for archiving. When you add a new target address, the check box is selected by default.

The Enterprise Vault SMTP server checks that the routing address is an SMTP target, and adds the routing address to the message as an X-RCPT-TO header. The SMTP server then places the message as an .eml file in the SMTP holding folder.

The SMTP Archiving task then processes the message file in the holding folder. As you enabled the target address for archiving, the task stores the message in the archive that is associated with the target routing address. Although the archive can be of any type, user archive types, such as Exchange Mailbox and Internet Mail archives, are not recommended for SMTP Journaling. The archive types that are typically used for journal archiving are SMTP, Shared, or Exchange Journal archives. In archive types that contain folders, such as SMTP archives, the SMTP Archiving task stores all messages in the Inbox. Other journal archive types, such as Shared and Exchange Journal archives, do not contain folders. In these archives, the task stores all messages in the root of the archive.

In SMTP Journaling, the SMTP Archiving task only needs to examine the X-RCPT-TO field in each message in the holding folder. The advanced SMTP site setting, Selective Journal Archiving, configures the archiving task to search all of the sender and recipient fields (X-RCPT-TO, To, CC, BCC, From, Sender) in each message. To optimize performance for SMTP Journaling, this advanced site setting should be set to Non-selective, the default value.

Figure: Example of SMTP Journaling shows a simple environment with one Enterprise Vault SMTP server. Production environments typically include several Enterprise Vault SMTP servers. As there could be a large volume of messages for journaling, it is advisable to spread the archiving load over several Enterprise Vault storage servers. You can do this by creating several journal archives in different vault stores. A different Enterprise Vault storage service should manage each of the vault stores. If you use a single SMTP routing address, you can implement target address rewriting on the SMTP servers to spread the archiving load across the Enterprise Vault storage services.

If the relay MTA is Exchange Server, you can create journal rules to select the appropriate routing address for the Enterprise Vault SMTP server.

See Using Exchange Server to journal messages to Enterprise Vault.

There are load balancing solutions available that you can use to distribute journaled messages over several Enterprise Vault SMTP servers. For example, basic load balancing can be implemented using DNS MX records with equal preference.

As mentioned, target address rewriting on the SMTP servers enables you to spread the archiving load over several archives and Enterprise Vault storage servers.

See About target address rewriting.

The following points summarize key tasks that you need to perform when implementing SMTP Journaling: