SMTP archiving examines the recipient email address on each message to decide in which folder to hold the message.
SMTP archiving selects the target folder for each message as follows:
It checks to see if a root folder exists for the recipient domain.
If a recipient domain root folder does not exist, the message is sent to the server non-delivery folder. If the non-delivery folder does not exist, SMTP archiving writes an error to the event log and discards the message.
Under the appropriate domain root folder, it checks for a mailbox folder for the recipient name.
If it finds the mailbox folder, the message is stored within that folder.
If the mailbox folder does not exist and auto-enabling of mailbox folders is on, SMTP archiving creates a new mailbox folder for the recipient name. SMTP archiving then stores the message within that folder.
If the mailbox folder does not exist and auto-enabling of mailbox folders is off, SMTP archiving sends the message to the non-delivery folder for that mailbox. If the non-delivery folder does not exist, SMTP archiving writes an error to the event log and discards the message.
The SMTP archiving configuration file defines the path to each root domain folder and non-delivery folder.
Figure: Example holding area folder structure shows an example holding area folder structure.
Under each mailbox folder, SMTP archiving holds the messages within a subfolder structure, not shown in the figure.
If SMTP archiving encounters a Disk Full error for at least one of the folders, it waits for 60 seconds and then tries to store the message again. You can set a limit on the number of times that SMTP archiving retries by specifying the DiskFullRetryLimit value in the SMTP archiving configuration file.
If SMTP archiving encounters an error, messages are sent to the Enterprise Vault event log. Critical messages are also sent to the following:
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