Let’s be clear about this before we go any further – yes you could use these techniques to spy on your staff, and yes at face value it may seem as though these techniques serve no purpose other than to spy on staff.  But the reality is that what I’m about to describe can be used quite legitimately within a business for purposes other than outright spying.

There are two features of Exchange Server 2007 that can be used for this – Journaling and Transport Rules.

Exchange Server 2007 Journaling

The best way to think of Journaling is that it is a way to make a copy of emails that match certain sender or recipient conditions.  Typically this is done for regulatory compliance purposes, such as a legal requirement to retain copies of all email received by a government department for Freedom of Information purposes.

When an email is “journaled” it is simply copied to another mailbox.  Basic Journaling will copy all emails sent to and from recipients on a mailbox database to a specified journal mailbox, whereas Premium Journaling allows some more granular control such as per-recipient journaling rules, but the concept remains essentially the same.

A genuine application of Premium Journaling might be to journal all emails sent to or from a customer service email address so that all such communications are kept on record.

Exchange Server 2007 Transport Rules

Transport Rules can be used to achieve the same outcome as Journaling however they have a lot more features available and offer much more granularity.  For example you can use Transport Rules to add disclaimers to emails in Exchange, or block confidential emails.

You can also use Transport Rules as a kind of internal email filtering for inappropriate content.  This would be useful for policing acceptable usage policies.  By configuring a Transport Rule that detects certain words and blind copies any such email to a HR mailbox for inspection an organization might detect and avoid harassment issues within the organization. Continue reading How to Spy on Your Staff with Exchange Server 2007

Depending on your type of business many federal or state regulations may require your company to archive email messages for electronic discovery.  As a smart proactive measure, more companies are voluntarily archiving email to protect themselves in case of a lawsuit. Lately, more are choosing to use Exchange Server journaling as an archiving method.  The question becomes, ‘Is journaling the best business decision?.  Or does implementation of a dedicated archiving solution provide a more secure data retrieval mechanism?’

Journaling and email archiving within Exchange Server are 2 distinct animals. Based on predetermined corporate policy selection criteria, archiving  removes old messages from the Exchange Server. Then the archiving software places the messages in a secure permanent repository. Journaling places a copy of target email messages into a designated mailbox.  This mailbox may usually remain on the same Exchange server as all the other staff email boxes.

Continue reading Microsoft Exchange Journaling vs. Archiving