Using Queue Viewer to Manage Messages

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Queue Viewer is a feature in Exchange System Manager that helps you to monitor your organization's messaging queues, and also the messages that are contained in those queues. Queue Viewer works at a server level. In Exchange System Manager, you expand the server and then click Queues to open Queue Viewer and display the messaging queues associated with the server.

Queue Viewer in Exchange 2003

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In Exchange Server 2003, Queue Viewer is enhanced to improve the monitoring of message queues. In Exchange 2003, you can view all the messaging queues for a specific server from the Queues node under each server. This is an improvement over Exchange 2000, where each protocol virtual server has its own Queues node, and you cannot view all queues on a server from a central location. For example, using Exchange 2003, you can now use Queue Viewer to view both the X.400 and SMTP queues on a server (as in Figure 5.24), rather than having to view each of these queues separately in each of their respective protocol nodes.

Other enhancements to Queue Viewer in Exchange 2003 include:

  • Disabling outbound mail   You can use a new option named Disable Outbound Mail to disable outbound mail from all SMTP queues.

  • Setting the refresh rate   You can use the Settings option to set the refresh rate of Queue Viewer.

  • Finding messages   You can use Find Messages to search for messages based on the sender, recipient, and message state. This option is similar to enumerating messages in Queue Viewer in Exchange 2000. For detailed instructions, see How to Use the Find Messages Option.

  • Viewing additional information   You can click a specific queue to view additional information about that queue.

  • Viewing previously hidden queues   Queue Viewer in Exchange 2003 exposes three queues that were not visible in Exchange 2000: DSN messages pending submission, Failed message retry queue, and Messages queued for deferred delivery.

The remainder of this section highlights two of these new enhancements, disabling outbound mail and finding messages, and also provides guidelines for how to use the SMTP and X.400 queues shown in Queue Viewer to troubleshoot message flow.