Hi,

I wanted to post a question to see if anyone has anymore insight on the journaling process.  We recently had an incident where we had migrated over to a new archiving system.  We had a send connector setup specifically for it to send to the archive system.  Once we moved it, to the new one, the new one was working fine.  We setup a separate send connector for the new system.  We then noticed later that messages were still queuing up under the old send connector.  Upon investigating, our databases still had the old journal recipient.  I removed it because we didn't need it for the new system.  We have a journaling rule setup for the new system.

Even after we found out about this and removed the journal recipient from the database and cleaned up that queue, it started filing up again (the old queue).  Journal reports were still queuing up to go to the old system.  Right now, it has finally stopped, but my question is this.  Do email messages get tagged somehow to be journaled?  And even if they are tagged to be journaled and can't make it to the queue will it attempt to send a journal report days / weeks later even if the configuration has changed?

I'm thinking of messages with a reset bit archive for backups.  Do messages get tagged for journaling in a similar way?

Right now since i don't have anymore messages queuing up to the old system, is there anything that i can check to make sure that journal recipient isn't available anywhere to be sending Journal reports too?

I have removed the recipient from the journal recipient and it's not setup in the journal rule. Those are the only places i've ch

Hi,

First, you must understand the difference between journaling and archiving:

Journaling is the ability to record all communications, including e-mail communications, in an organization for use in the organization's e-mail retention or archival strategy.

Archiving refers to backing up the data, removing it from its native environment, and storing it elsewhere, therefore reducing the strain of data storage. You may use Exchange journaling as a tool in your e-mail retention or archival strategy.

In your scenario, I noticed that you want to remove the old journal recipient and create a new journal rule for new system. Please do the following changes:

Get-MailboxDatabase | Set-MailboxDatabase -JournalRecipient $Null

New-JournalRule -Name "Discovery Journal Recipients" -Recipient newuser@domain.com -JournalEmailAddress "Journal Mailbox" -Scope Global -Enabled $True

Then check whether the old journal recipient still receive the report or not.

Regards,

Hi Winnie,

Thanks for the info.  I do get that archiving is strictly for backing up and removal by definition and that journaling is recording of the communications (which we are using for an archival strategy).  I'm just asking more indepth on how it works.  I used the archive bit result for files only as an illustration because I understand how that works in backing up data from a file server.  Essentially, that check mark is a way for the backup system to know to grab that file.  What I want to know is how Exchange flags messages to be journaled or copied because this may help answer my question of why so many messages were still queuing up even after I removed the journal recipient from the databases.

Now since it's recording communication, it sounds to me that journaling would happen at the hub transport level, but it also seems that it's working at the database level as well.  My thinking is that there were so many messages that didn't get journaled when this migration happened and the old journal recipient was not removed from the databases that once the queue reached 400,000+ messages, there were and additional 200,000+ that were trying to be journaled to that old recipient after I changed all that. 

I did remove all my journal recipients and checked the journal rule for this old journal recipient and I still see the queue to the old recipient still getting a message every now and then.  Which if it's the case that it's still somehow trying to catch up with messages being 'flagged' (may or may not be the correct term) to be journaled to that old recipient, then that would make sense.  Or else I've missed something somewhere to tell messages to stop going to that journal recipient.