The worst possible time to define your uptime and availability requirements for an Exchange environment is when that environment is unavailable.  No email administrator wants to hear “We need this working within 2 hours” when they are looking at a dead server that is going to take all night to recover.

Uptime and availability should be defined within an SLA, or Service Level Agreement.  An Exchange Server SLA should exist in all organizations, even those that provide their own internal IT services.  The SLA is between the IT supplier or IT department and the rest of the business, and clearly defines what is an acceptable downtime or outage of the Exchange environment.

Why Are SLAs So Important?

The existence of an SLA supports many facets of the design and operation of the Exchange Server environment.

Budget – When a business defines their service level requirements they are making a commitment to providing the funds necessary to deliver those service levels.  An SLA is one of the best pieces of leverage the IT department has to secure those funds and implement an appropriate Exchange system.  Without the backing of an SLA the IT department may struggle to get approval for Enterprise server licensing, multiple servers for clustering, and other high availability components.

Server and Network Design – Exchange Server environments are designed to meet defined SLAs.  Certain uptime expectations can only be met with the right server design.  A business that is willing to go a day without email would not need the same infrastructure deployed as a bank that can’t go more than 15 minutes without email.  Clustering, redundancy, site-to-site failover, are all design points that would be included or excluded based on the SLA. Continue reading Exchange Server SLAs, and Why You Need One

Sending and receiving emails over the network involves the transmission of data to and from common application services such as network services and mail services. At the lower levels in the technology stack, email is sent to services identified by their well known port numbers. Between email clients and email servers the port number used is port 25 for sending emails over TCP/IP networks.

On most email servers, a background process, or daemon, will listen to port 25 for any incoming email. This is the port that clients make socket connections in order to be able to send their emails. Sometimes the port is blocked or unavailable on the email server.

When retrieving email from the server there is another port that can also be blocked and thus prevent emails from being receive. If port 110 is blocked then the client cannot pull down their messages.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Error Code 0×800ccc0e

As an email administrator it is often asked of you to produce statistics showing how your email server is being utilized. This can be very important to IT departments that are run as their own profit and loss centers without the benefit of funding that comes out of the company budget. It is to any administrator’s advantage that they be able to run a set of comprehensive reports that will allow them to charge their customers an appropriate amount for their services.

Some of the reports that an email administrator should be able to run include:  the amount of messages sent and received by any department customer, statistics related to message size or number of receivers, delivery times – what week, day, time and other factors, reports based on distribution lists and reports based on protocols used.

Continue reading The Importance of Email Server Reporting

The Register reported that popular business ISP ClaraNet was down since early morning on April 3rd and estimated that that email service would be out until sometime late the following day at the earliest. ClaraNet said that service was partially restored – users could send and recieve email but c0uld not access any emails stored in their inboxes. The ISP say no emails have been lost.

          According to ClaraNet’s support site, incoming mail has not been lost, but is queued waiting to be delivered. The firm apologised for the inconvenience and targeted 6pm tomorrow for the restoration of full service.

The company has not publically explained the reason for the outage but some sources speculate that it was related to a failed RAID controller. Outages do happen, and it’s a good reminder to always have some sort of backup system in place just in case so that you can continue business as usual. Like electricity, you never realize just how much you depend on email until you’re suddenly cut off from it!

Another thing to remember in case of an outage is to communicate with your customers and vendors. Placing a notice on your website and/or on your company’s automated phone system is a good idea. A little communication goes a long way in building customer confidence and loyalty!

In any large organization there will come a time when the IT department will have to migrate their existing users to a new mail server. Lots of times this migration is a result of two companies merging their IT operations together. Other times the migration is driven by a company’s decision to standardize on one platform so as to simplify administration and reduce maintenance costs.

The migration can be made less painful for users if careful planning is performed during the initial stages. Many tools exist to convert mail folders from one format to another. For example, there are tools to convert from Outlook/Exchange mailbox and personal folders (.pst files) to the Domino server mailbox or local .nsf files

Or in the case of going from an existing IMAP server to Google Apps there are tools that help domain administrators transfer the contents of users mailboxes without risking the loss of existing mail. Of course having a recent backup is most important to insure against the loss of email. In addition, you want to verify that the migration tool you use will keep and/or display a log of each mail message migrated including the sender, receiver and date of the migrated email message.

Folder structures should also be preserved so that users can stay as productive as possible after email migrations. You don’t want users having to spend their time recreating the email folders they use for staying organized nor having to repopulate their email folders from backup. You want to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Continue reading Email Migration Management

As an IT administrator you have to make sure your servers are up and running at all times, with email being so critical to the business as users communicate via email for almost everything.  You want to make sure you search for a good, easy-to-install monitoring solution.  The first question you have to ask yourself is what you really need in monitoring software.  To begin with you want to check the health of the system and the performance, check the email traffic and see if there are problems.

You do not want a call from the end users alerting you that a problem has occurred.  You want to be a step ahead and by having a system that can alert you of a potential problem would be ideal.  You can be alerted either via email, SMS or a mobile device.  Another aspect is to minimize the downtime of a server.  The software should be able to take corrective action if a potential problem arises.  The corrective action can be set on certain criteria that you set up before hand, such as restarting a service or do a server reboot.

Continue reading Tips for Managing your Email Servers