How to Enable Diagnostics Logging for the SMTP Service in Exchange System Manager
This procedure explains how to enable diagnostics logging for the SMTP service in Exchange System manager. You would execute this procedure if you wanted to increase the amount of information being written to the Application log of Windows Event Viewer.
You can review the additional SMTP service events in the Application log of Windows Event Viewer. Review the event descriptions of the additional events that are logged to help you determine the root cause of any problems you are experiencing.
Before You Begin
Before you perform the procedure in this topic, consider the following:
Setting the diagnostics logging level to Maximum can cause many events to be written to the application event log. As a best practice, set the size of the application and system event log to 30 MB, and enable the option to overwrite events as needed. Remember to reapply the default setting of None after you solve the problem.
Procedure
Enable diagnostics logging for the SMTP service in Exchange System Manager
Display the properties of the Exchange Server object that hosts the SMTP virtual servers.
Select the Diagnostics Logging tab.
Under Services, select MSExchangeTransport.
Under Categories, select all the categories that the SMTP service provides, including Routing Engine/Service, Categorizer, Queuing Engine, Exchange Store Driver, NTFS Store Driver, SMTP Protocol, and Connection Manager.
Under Logging Level, select the appropriate logging level. In a troubleshooting situation, it is appropriate to increase the level of event logging for the MSExchangeTransport services to Maximum to obtain the most detailed information.
For More Information
For more information about SMTP service diagnosic logging, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 265139, How to enable SMTP protocol logging in Exchange 2000 Server and in Exchange Server 2003.
You can also gather more data regarding SMTP events by reviewing SMTP protocol information that is logged through Internet Information Services. This additional information is logged in specific log files rather than in the Application log. For more information, see the following:
For information about how to enable SMTP protocol logging for Internet Information Services, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 303738, How to enable SMTP protocol logging for Internet Information Services in Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000.
For information about how to review SMTP protocol logs for Internet Information Services, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 257538, XFOR: How to Obtain Additional Information from Internet Mail or Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail.