How to retrieve Exchange email delivered to inactive accounts and manage NDRs

How do I configure the Exchange 2000 Administrator account to receive messages for accounts that have been deleted? I received a message to the system administrator account that an attempt was made to deliver an email to an inactive account. I need to get that email so I can forward it to the appropriate person if it is business related.

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Microsoft's how-to article (Q315631), Forward mail with unresolved recipients to a single mailbox, might help you address this scenario. This approach uses the event sink features of Microsoft's SMTP virtual server. Although, you may find it somewhat complex to implement

Other software vendors sell NDR management utilities that may be more flexible and easier to configure and use -- for example, MailBasketMD from TurboGeeks or MAPILab's Mail Storage Guard. Some solutions also eliminate returning the NDR back to sender, which can help reduce spam.

A manual process, which would be inefficient in larger sites, could retrieve the original email message from the BADMAIL folder. A utility release by Microsoft archives and purges the BADMAIL folder contents with a BadMailAdmin.wsf script run through Windows Task Scheduler. Scanning through the email looking for "real email" amongst potentially lots of spam could be a hassle though. The utility supports Exchange 2000 SP2 and Exchange 2003.

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This was first published in December 2004

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