OK this isn't a standard business but I'd like to offer it to my company. I'd like to turn off mail delivery to our mailboxes on Friday afternoons. Mailboxes coudl still be opened as reference; mail can be sent, but nothing new will be allowed in. the idea is to set up a scripted process that tuirns off mail delivery at (say) 13:00 and resumes it at 18:00, at which point any queued messages will be delivered. Has anyone done this? Is it safe? Can you recommend a method? thanks in advance, Pete Also - this is not as frivolous as it might appear. Many of my users see email at best as a necessary evil & I am trying to find a way of making them view it more positively. If I can get them to do that I can get them to use some of Exchange's funkier features, but don't tell them that...

You can use these two commands to stop and restart the Exchange Transport Service: C:\>net stop "Microsoft Exchange Transport" The Microsoft Exchange Transport service is stopping..... The Microsoft Exchange Transport service was stopped successfully. C:\>net start "Microsoft Exchange Transport" The Microsoft Exchange Transport service is starting....... The Microsoft Exchange Transport service was started successfully. You could add these two commands to two .bat/.cmd files and schedule them with Task Scheduler (Administrative Tools). This should be completely safe: No mail will be received, sent mail will stay in the Outbox. It might trigger off Delivery Status Notifications (DSNs) to notify senders from outside of a delayed delivery. Not sure if that will happen within a time frame of five hours. The next question is of course: Is this a nice thing to do to users. Your users will come to rely on e-mail … but then again, outside the scope of your question. MCTS: Messaging | MCSE: S+M | Small Business Specialist

The only problem with stopping transport is that when it is restarted email from the Internet will NOT be delivered immediately. Stopping transport means the Exchange server isn't accepting email from the Internet. Therefore email delivery will occur when the remote server tries next. That could mean email delivers over the next three to six hours or more. The only way would be to have email delivered to a server under your control which sits between Exchange and the Internet (so the email is under your control) and then stop transport as outlined above. When transport is restarted you can kick the server that is holding the email and it will deliver the email. Of course that opens another can of worms with antispam filtering, av filtering, dealing with bounces and other NDRs. Then you have the no exceptions problem. It is not unusual for the boss to want this for everyone else, but him. It is an all or nothing state and isn't something I would implement unless requested by the boss (it isn't something I would offer to do). Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP. http://blog.sembee.co.uk , http://exbpa.com/

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 16:02:55 +0000, Sembee wrote: >The only problem with stopping transport is that when it is restarted email from the Internet will NOT be delivered immediately. Stopping transport means the Exchange server isn't accepting email from the Internet. Therefore email delivery will occur when the remote server tries next. That could mean email delivers over the next three to six hours or more. Maybe. I've had to deal with customers that had as short as a two HOUR timeout on e-mail delivery! >The only way would be to have email delivered to a server under your control which sits between Exchange and the Internet (so the email is under your control) and then stop transport as outlined above. When transport is restarted you can kick the server that is holding the email and it will deliver the email. > >Of course that opens another can of worms with antispam filtering, av filtering, dealing with bounces and other NDRs. > >Then you have the no exceptions problem. It is not unusual for the boss to want this for everyone else, but him. It is an all or nothing state and isn't something I would implement unless requested by the boss (it isn't something I would offer to do). All in all, I'd say that the "e-mail holiday" isn't a very good idea. Just tell people to ignore the new e-mail for the afternoon. If they do, they do. If they don't, they don't. Their choice. If they're that easily distracted then maybe they should just exit Outlook (and IM, and web browsers, etc.)? --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP