SMTP Routing in Exchange 2010

Starting with Exchange Server 2007 all SMTP traffic in Exchange Server is routed through the Hub Transport Server. The reason behind this is compliancy. By routing all messages through the Hub Transport Server it is always possible to track messages. It is also possible to temporarily store these messages so when a disaster strikes Exchange can always (try to) recover these messages from the Hub Transport Server such as, during a failover in a CCR cluster or a Database Availability Group. In this series of articles Id like to explain a bit more about the Hub Transport Server and the SMTP message flow within Exchange Server 2010.

Message flow
In Exchange Server 2010 all messages are always routed through the Hub Transport Server. This is the case for:

Messages routed to and from the Internet, with and without an Edge Transport Server; Messages routed to other Active Directory sites within the Exchange organization; Messages between mailboxes on the same Mailbox Server, even mailboxes within the same Mailbox Database;

Yes, you read that last one correct. If theres one Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server with only two mailboxes on it, and the first mailbox sends a message to the second mailbox, it is routed through the Hub Transport Server. If the Hub Transport Server is not available, the message will not be sent and the message will not leave the mailbox!

Transport internals
To get a better idea of the message transport in Exchange Server 2010 we have to identify several services in the Exchange environment that play an important role in message routing. 1. Mail Submission Service when a message is created and the Send button is clicked, the new message is placed in the mailbox outbox. Theres a service running on the Mailbox Server role called the Exchange Mail Submission Service which notifies the Hub Transport Server that a new message is awaiting for processing. The Mailbox Server has an internal list of Hub Transport Servers in the same Active Directory site (the submission server list) which is updated every 10 minutes. This is done by the server discovery process. A round robin mechanism is responsible for load balancing the SMTP traffic across these Hub Transport Servers; 2. Store Drivers the Hub Transport Servers Store Driver retrieves the message from the Outbox and puts it in the Submission Queue on the Hub Transport Server. The Store Driver uses RPC to retrieve the message from the Mailbox Server. Theres no traffic on port 25 (i.e. SMTP) between the Hub Transport Server and the Mailbox Server; 3. Submission Queue this is a queue, located on the Hub Transport Server where all messages are stored that need to be processed. Not only the Store drivers can store

messages in the submission queue, but this can also be done through a receive connector or the pickup directory. 4. Categorizer the categorizer retrieves messages from the submission queue and determines where the message needs to be sent to. This can be an internal Active Directory recipient or an external recipient. The categorizer also expands distribution groups and identifies alternative recipients or forwarding addresses. 5. Pickup Directory this is a directory that is checked once every 5 seconds for new messages. When a message is in the correct EML format it is picked up from this directory and when the process is completed the file is deleted from the pickup directory.

Figure 1: Overview of the Hub Transport Server Role

Queues
A queue is a temporary location where messages that are waiting for processing are stored. The submission queue is already discussed, but there are more queues:

Mailbox Delivery Queue This queue stores messages that will be delivered to mailboxes on a Mailbox Server. Again, communication between the Hub Transport Server and the Mailbox Server for mailbox delivery is encrypted RPC. Note: a mailbox delivery queue only exists on Hub Transport Servers and not on Edge Transport Servers; Remote Delivery Queue this is a queue where messages are stores that need to be delivered remotely. Remote delivery queues can exists on Hub Transport Servers as well as Edge Transport Servers. Theres a remote delivery queue for every domain the Transport Server is sending messages to. So, if there are outbound messages sent to for example jaapwess@hotmail.com, then a remote delivery queue exists for the domain hotmail.com. These remote delivery queues only exist for a small amount of time. After successful delivering of the message to hotmail.com, the queue for this 2

domain is deleted, but only when no other messages are sent within a couple of minutes. Besides a remote delivery queue for every external domain, theres also a remote delivery queue for every Active Directory site that contains other Hub Transport Servers; Poison Message Queue There are specific messages that Exchange considers to be harmful to the Exchange system after a server failure. If such messages are encountered then they are stored in the poison message queue. The poison message is empty during normal operations and therefore it does not appear in the Queue viewer. Unreachable Queue This queue contains messages that cannot be routed to their original destination, for example after reconfiguring the routing infrastructure.

Queue Database Files

In Exchange 2003 and earlier the queues were stored on the local disk in the c:\mailroot\queue directory, or a queue directory in the Exchange Server directory. Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2010 store their queues in an ESE database. This database is located in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\TransportRoles\data\Queue directory. ESE operations on this Queue Database file are similar to those of a normal ESE Mailbox Database file. So transactions are stored to the log files first and later on are committed to the Queue Database file. The checkpoint file keeps track of which transactions are already written to the Queue Database file. Log files of the Queue Database file circular logging are enabled by default. This means that older log files are deleted when they are no longer needed. Because of this, it is not possible to recover old data from the log files. Since the data in the Queue Database file is volatile (i.e. it exists for a short period of time in the queue and the database) this is not an issue. The Queue Database consists of the following files:

Mail.que the actual Queue Database file; Tmp.edb temporary file for Queue Database file operations; Trn*.log the individual log files for storing Queue Database transactions; Trn.chk the checkpoint file that keeps track which transactions are already committed to the Queue Database; Trnres00001.jrs and Trnres00002.jrs two reserved empty log files that are used when the disk is full during normal log file operations.

Figure 2: The Queue directory on local disk. Already 2459 log files (99B hexadecimal) are createdon this server. We have seen the message transport in Exchange and services that play an important role in message routing and went through the various queues of the Exchange database. In my next article I will cover the communication between Exchange Hub Transport Servers in more detail. In Part I of this series I explained how SMTP messages are processed with an Exchange Server, in particular how a Hub Transport Server processes messages from a Mailbox Server.

Figure 1: The SMTP "Transport Pipeline" in Exchange Server 2010 I already explained how a Hub Transport Server picks up a message from the Mailbox Server to process it. There can be multiple Hub Transport Servers in an Active Directory site. The Mail Submissions Service on the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server notifies the Hub Transport Server that a message is in the Outbox. The Store Driver on the Hub Transport Server retrieves the message from the Mailbox Server. RPC is used for communication between the Hub and the Mailbox Server. After retrieval, the message is stored in the Submission Queue waiting for further processing. The Categorizer picks up the message again and determines where to send it:

Back to the Mailbox Server; To another Mailbox Server in the same Active Directory site. Again, RPC is used for communication between the Hub Server and the other Mailbox Server; To another Hub Transport Server in another Active Directory site. Communication between Hub Transport Servers is via SMTP; To the outside world. For sending messages to the outside world (i.e. the Internet) SMTP is used as well.

You can have multiple Hub Transport Servers in one Active Directory site for redundancy and scalability purposes. When you have multiple Hub Transport Servers in your Active Directory site, the Mailbox Servers keeps an internal list of all these Hub Transport Servers. The Mail Submission Service then Round Robins through this list as to notify a Hub Transport Server and to pick up the message from the Outbox. This way the Mailbox Server load balances between all available Hub Transport Servers in the Active Directory Site. But, before we can send and receive SMTP message we first have to configure the Hub Transport Server with a Send Connector (to send mail) and configure the Receive Connector (to receive mail).

Send Connector
Right out of the box, Exchange 2010 doesnt have a way to send message to the Outside world. Before you can send message you have to create a Send Connector: 1. Logon as an administrator on an Exchange 2010 Server and open the Exchange Management Console. Navigate to the Organization Configuration and select Hub Transport. In the results pane, select the Send Connector tab; 2. The New Send Connector wizard appears. Enter a name for the Send Connector and select its usage (Internet) and follow the wizard. Enter * for the address space. This way the Send Connector will be used for all SMTP domains, except for the internal SMTP domains of course. 3. Next is to select whether you want to use a smart host (an SMTP server with your provider for example) of whether you want to use DNS. In the latter case the Hub Transport Server will be responsible to retrieve all MX records and send the outbound messages accordingly. My personal preference is to use DNS, but you might have valid reasons to use a smart host of course;

Figure 2 4. In the next Windows you have to select the Source Server. If you have multiple Hub Transport Servers in your Active Directory site you can enter them here. These servers all participate in the Send Connector. SMTP messages will automatically be load balanced across all source servers in the Send Connector; 5. Finish the wizard and the Send Connector will be created. The Hub Transport Server is now able to route messages to the Internet.

Receive Connector
By default, a Hub Transport Server will not accept anonymous connections. And connections coming form the Internet are anonymous. Microsofts opinion is that you need to use the Edge Transport Server (in your DMZ). The Edge Transport Server does accept anonymous connections from the Internet, and communications between Edge Transport Server and Hub Transport Server is secure. Ill get back to using an Edge Transport Server in one of the next articles in this series. But if you want to enable anonymous connections you have to enable this on the Default Receive Connector. Open the Exchange Management Console, Navigate to the Server Configuration and select Hub Transport. In the results pane, select your Hub Transport

Server and in the low pane, select the Default Receive Connector and request its properties. Click on the Permission Groups tab to see who is allowed to connect to this Receive Connector. The Anonymous Users is not selected by default as shown in this screenshot:

Figure 3

Check the Anonymous users checkbox and click OK to close the window. The Transport Services needs to be restarted for this setting to take effect. Open an Exchange Management Shell window and enter the Restart-Service MSExchangeTransport command. We now have a Hub Transport Server that can send and receive SMTP messages to and from the Internet. Please note that when you use an appliance in your DMZ, for example a Barracuda, IronPort or McAfee solution this is considered as anonymous from a Hub Transport Server point of view.

Mail flow to the Internet

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When a client creates a new message and clicks the Send button the message is placed in the Outbox. A Hub Transport Server will pickup the message and will place it in the Submission Queue on the Hub Transport Server. In this Submission Queue the message is safely stored on the hard disk of the Hub Transport Server. The Hub Transport Server can crash and reboot, but the message is still safe. The Categorizer would pick up the message from the Submission Queue and check the To: field in the message to determine the recipients. The routing component of the Categorizer determines the final destination for the message. For Internet delivery, the message is delivered to SMTP Out (part of the MSExchange Transport Service) which uses the Send Connector that was created in the previous step. Depending on the address space a routing decision is made. A queue is created for every message that is sent. This is true for internal messages (back to a mailbox server in the current Active Directory site as well as other Hub Transport Servers in the Exchange organization) and for external messages. You can view the queues using the Queue Viewer. Open the Exchange Management Console and navigate to the Toolbox section. Select the Queue Viewer in the results pane.

Figure 4

You can see the individual queues, the status, the number of messages in the queue and when there are some issues, the error is shown as well. Using the Queue Viewer you need to connect to every Hub Transport Server so see messages in queues on other servers.

You can also use the Exchange Management Shell to get queue information using the GetQueue cmdlet. When combined with the Get-TransportServer cmdlet you can see all queues on all Hub Transport Servers:

Figure 5

Whats a reasonable amount of messages in a queue and how long do they stay there? Thats not an easy question to answer. Youll see quite a number of queues as a result of NDRs (when spam is sent to non existing users) that cannot be delivered. Typically these queues have only 1 or 2 messages. When there are problems using delivery on the other SMTP hosts, the number of messages will increase. This is the time to start troubleshooting.

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