Monitoring mail traffic of selected MS Exchange users

    It may be necessary to control the incoming and outgoing mail of some employees. Searching for ready-made solutions that either did not like the price, or did not suit the functionality, I took the idea from them and dopped to a simple little scheme.

    And so, we need The Bat! (or any other one that has a mail sorter and preferably a task scheduler, for example, I later converted it to Thunderbird ), as well as working MS Exchange .



    At my disposal was Exchange 2003 Standard, which, among other differences from Enterprise, allows you to create only one repository. If you are unlimited in the number of storages, then I would recommend creating a new one for our tasks and transferring to it the mailboxes of users who are of interest to us. Then the tricks with The Bat! Filters described below will not be needed.

    Next, in the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in, create a new user (we will only be interested in his mailbox). I will not tell you how to do this, because this is absolutely the basics. For example, let's give him the name "journal". Personally, I added “Hide from Exchange address lists” to the usual settings so that the user does not pester us in the global address book. Next, in Exchange System Manager, go to the storage settings.



    check the box "Archive all messages sent or received by mailboxes on this store" and, going to Browse, select the freshly created journal user. Save. This is where the Exchange settings ended. Now all mail of the custom storage will be duplicated in the specified mailbox. From it, we will scoop out all the mail, filtering the excess. We pass to The Bat! We create a new mailbox for our purposes: we remove the checkbox “Leave messages on the server” and that’s where the mailbox settings are finished. We go to the “ Mail Sorter” right away and create a new rule, I called it “Del”. Its meaning is that it will delete all letters, don’t related to the user we are interested in ivan_petrov@domain.com















    . If you are interested in several people, then their addresses also need to be entered in the conditions. Pay attention to the “OR” variable, if you leave “AND”, then the rule will only work on letters that Ivan Petrov wrote to himself :) In the actions we set the message to be deleted. Thus, all other letters will be deleted after receipt.

    Next, go to the built-in The Bat! sheduler and create a rule that will periodically check our mailbox and sort letters from it.





    When we finish, the following should happen - all the mail from our store will be duplicated in the mailbox we created, from where The Bat! 'S will be pulled out. Excess will be deleted. By changing the sorting rules, you can archive mail not of individual users, but of all, except for unnecessary ones. Well, there may be variations on the topic. I would also recommend creating another rule in the mail client that would compress the folders of this mailbox, because she will swell slightly.

    Well, I remind you that all these actions can be considered illegal. In general, consult with the lawyers of your organization before fleeing to perform similar actions.

    ps: this is a cross-post from my main blog, so copyrights in the screenshots are not a PR attempt at all :)

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