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Santosh Chandavaram
Asked: 2010-02-19 23:31:51 +0800 CST

Key components to take care of in an Email architecture

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What are key components to take care of in an inhouse or hosted email system? What configuration settings doea an administrator have to go through periodically?

email exchange

3 Answers

  1. Your questions a little vague, but some of the regular responsibility's of a mail admin that come to mind are:

    • Backups
    • Archiving
    • Retention Compliance
    • Monitoring mail queues
    • Monitoring of logs and errors
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  2. Going to agree with Sam here and state that the question is vague. I think something you can could add to help us anwser your question more effectively would be the size of your user base. Is this a 10 person small business with a single Exchange server hosted locally, or mid-size business with options?

    You have two questions, so I'll go by each one here:

    "What are key components to take care of in an inhouse or hosted email system?"

    • Backing up, and testing those backups.
    • Anti-Virus/Spam solution
    • Server(s) health (RAID Arrays, monitoring, clean up clutter)
    • Email Archiving and Retention - if required by industry standards or management

    "What configuration settings doea an administrator have to go through periodically?"

    This is very much impacted by, again, your user base.

    But you'll need to periodically check logs (both the mail server application logs and OS server logs to detect errors that could cause downtime before it happens) and clean up user accounts and rights as needed.

    Also, you'll want to implement some mailbox management policies, so defining max sizes of messages, items, and mailboxes to keep things in order.

    Also run some performance monitoring on the server from time to time (like disk queue size, pages per sec) to see if you catch anything unusually high. Also monitoring user activity is helpful. (for Exchange see ExMon: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9A49C22E-E0C7-4B7C-ACEF-729D48AF7BC9&displaylang=en).

    It's in house, so performance and uptime are on you to ensure.

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  3. Good Backups and Server health are the most important in my book. Losing all of the email for the CEO of your company is nothing you every want to deal with. Heading any problems off on hardware level is crucial as well.

    In-house hosted email has its own alarm system as well, because you'll know almost immediately from the higher ups if it is down or not functioning correctly.

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