UC Unleashed

Dealing with spam is like herding cats. It moves in every direction, and just when you think you might have it corralled, something comes along in a completely different direction.

Exchange has some fabulous features for reducing the amount of spam that lands in end-user mailboxes, and those features are well documented. Sometimes, you just want to see what’s being stopped. That’s where today’s one liner comes in. This little tidbit will troll through the tracking logs of the server you run it on, and display the failed messages from the last 7 days – most of which are stopped by the Content Filtering Agent. Of course, you can change the number of days to look back, as larger environments will no doubt have a tremendous number of failed messages. Here we see the sender’s email address, recipients, message subject, and the time stamp when the message was attempted.

Get-MessageTrackingLog -ResultSize unlimited -Start ((Get-Date).AddDays(-7)) | Where-Object {$_.EventId -eq "fail"} | Select-Object Sender,Recipients,MessageSubject,TimeStamp

We can specify a specific server to search on:

Get-MessageTrackingLog -ResultSize unlimited -Server  -Start ((Get-Date).AddDays(-7)) | Where-Object {$_.EventId -eq "fail"} | Select-Object Sender,Recipients,MessageSubject,TimeStamp

Or, search all servers:

Get-TransportServer | Get-MessageTrackingLog -ResultSize unlimited -Start ((Get-Date).AddDays(-7)) | Where-Object {$_.EventId -eq "fail"} | Select-Object Sender,Recipients,MessageSubject,TimeStamp

And, we can also dump the data to a .csv file for manipulation:

Get-MessageTrackingLog -ResultSize unlimited -Start ((Get-Date).AddDays(-7)) | Where-Object {$_.EventId -eq "fail"} | Select-Object Sender,Recipients,MessageSubject,TimeStamp | Export-Csv c:\failedmessages.csv

Enjoy!