Dealing with Badmail

Those of you running Exchange 2000 will probably know of the existence of the Badmail folder, which is typically found in the \Program Files\exchsrvr\Mailroot\VSI 1\BadMail folder.

The Badmail folder contains messages that cannot be delivered into your organisation, and also cannot be returned back to the sender. Therefore, the folder typically contains spam, and the files within the folder can usually just be deleted.

However, Exchange doesn't provide a setting to periodically empty the contents of the folder. The danger is that this folder will go un-monitored, and will continue to fill up.

To combat this problem, two different scripts are available here.

First, I've written a script that simply sends a notification message to selected mailboxes, informing the recipients of the number of files in the Badmail folder, along with how much space the files are taking up. Simply schedule the script to run on, say, a weekly basis using the Windows Scheduler. Now you get a weekly reminder to empty the Badmail folder, if it does actually need emptying. You can download this script here. Just make the modifications shown in the script to reflect the settings in your environment.

The beauty of this script is that it doesn't need a mailbox to send the notification message; it just uses the SMTP virtual server. Just make sure the sending address has a valid internal domain name - the remainder of the address can be fictitious.

Call me paranoid, but I don't like scripts that automatically purge files in a folder. But there's a different script available written by Jon Pervan, who has kindly allowed the script to be made available here. This script will automatically purge the contents of the BadMail folder - no questions asked!

As always, you run these scripts at your own risk - be sure to test them in a non-production environment first.

Neil Hobson

(Update - Microsoft have released their own script to assist with the management of Badmail