Configuration settings for the Email Connector for Microsoft Exchange

You can adapt settings for problem determination, retry, and logging as well as the credentials that are used for connecting to the Microsoft Exchange server. You can also determine the directories that are used for address book lookups.

General settings

Edit these settings if required:
Maximum number of mailboxes to be processed in parallel
This number determines the number of threads that are used to process mailboxes in parallel. When a collector is started, it resolves the source, such as the group or SMTP address, into a list of mailboxes. For each mailbox, a request to crawl the mailbox is added to a single job queue on which the specified number of crawler threads work. The number of crawler threads is independent of the number of collectors. Any number of collectors can add entries to this job queue.

The number of mailboxes processed in parallel has an impact on performance, not the number of collectors running in parallel. The greater the number of mailboxes processed in parallel, the higher is the stress on the mail system.

Number of log file copies to keep for problem determination
If a problem occurs with the connector processes, the connector copies its log files to a separate subdirectory of the log file directory for later analysis. The crash directory is a subdirectory of the support directory and contains as many subdirectories for failures as you define here. The name of the subdirectory for the failure information is the timestamp when the failure occurred, for example, <icclog>\support\crash\<timestamp>, where <icclog> is the path to the log file location. The Content Collector default path is C:\Program Files\IBM\ContentCollector\ctms\log on a 32-bit operating system and C:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\ContentCollector\ctms\log on a 64-bit operating system.
Retry interval
This is the time interval after which documents for which processing failed are processed again. However, documents with a permanent problem are not processed again.

The retry interval should not be smaller than the schedule interval of active task routes. For example, if the task route is configured to run every hour and the retry interval is even shorter, the maximum number of retries for an erroneous document might be reached before temporary error conditions can be detected.

Also consider the maintenance intervals of source and target servers, when you set the retry interval.

Maximum number of processing attempts
This setting defines how often a collector attempts to process documents again when the processing failed before. Limit the number of processing attempts so that an erroneous document is not processed over and over again. You can find details about the erroneous document under Tools > Blacklist.

The maximum number should not be lower than two, so that temporary errors do not prevent blacklisted documents from being successfully reprocessed.

Enable stubbing functions for CommonStore documents
Select this option to enable the stubbing functions for documents that were archived with IBM® CommonStore. Configure stubbing for CommonStore documents in the stubbing collector.
Log settings
Define the level of detail for logging events and the location where the log files are stored.

With the Truncate log files option, you configure multiple log files. Also specify the maximum number of log files to be created and the maximum size that a log file is allowed to reach. There is a dependency between the number of log files and the size that each log file can have. As soon as the first log file reaches this size level, a new log file is created. When the maximum number of log files has been reached, and all log files have also reached their maximum size, the oldest log file is overwritten with a new one. This is also known as the round-robin method. If you do not select to configure multiple log files, a single log file of unlimited size is written.

Working directory
Specify the full path to the directory in which you want to save temporary files. These files are created by collectors and provide the basis for further processing steps in a task route. The path must contain no other characters than a-z, A-Z, and 0-9 of the Latin-1 character set.
Important: The working directory must be a local directory on a separate and fast disk and not on a shared network drive. If you use a shared network directory as working directory, this will decrease performance significantly.

Connection settings

You must provide certain credentials so that IBM Content Collector can connect to an email server. Select Automatic configuration and provide the credentials of the user who runs the IBM Content Collector Email Connector service. These credentials are used to automatically determine the host name of the Microsoft Exchange Server to which Content Collector should connect. Alternatively, you can manually provide the fully qualified host name of the Microsoft Exchange mail server for Microsoft Exchange 2007 or of the Microsoft Exchange Server that has the CAS Role (CAS Server) for Microsoft Exchange 2010 or 2013.

You can select to open mailboxes or public folders or both with privileged access if the account running the IBM Content Collector Email Connector service and the IBM Content Collector Web Application service has these Exchange administrator rights.
Microsoft Exchange 2007
The account requires the Exchange Organization Administrator role or Exchange Server Administrator role for all Microsoft Exchange mail servers that host the mailboxes to be archived or the trigger mailbox.

You can use the Exchange Management Console to apply an administrator role to an account.

Microsoft Exchange 2010 or 2013 or 2016
The account must be a member of the Exchange built-in role group Organization Management.
If the account does not have Exchange administrator rights, it requires these access rights:
  • For opening mailboxes, full access permission to all mailboxes to be archived and to the trigger mailbox
  • For opening public folders, the permission level Editor for the public folders to be archived and the permission level Reviewer for the parent folders

To archive messages from personal folders (PST files), the account does not require specific access rights unless you use the EC Copy to Mailbox task to copy the message stubs from the PST to a mailbox. In this case, the account must have Exchange administrator rights or full access permission on the mailbox that is associated with the PST.

The Email Connector automatically detects whether to use RPC or RPC over HTTP to connect to Microsoft Exchange. When connecting to Microsoft Exchange 2013, RPC over HTTP is used. In this case, you can enforce an SSL connection.

Because the connector that you are configuring is a Windows service, you must specify the account and the password that you want to use to access the Exchange server on the properties sheet of the IBM Content Collector Email Connector service. Additionally, the IBM Content Collector Web Application service must run under the same user ID. This account requires full access to the local disk. Otherwise, the services cannot be started, and no log information can be written.

See the related topics for more information about access rights and for information about how to change the user account that starts the IBM Content Collector Email Connector service and the IBM Content Collector Web Application service.

Active Directory settings

When IBM Content Collector archives an email, the email needs to be associated with the correct email user so that the mailbox of this user can be identified when the email is stubbed or restored. Because a user can have several email addresses, a lookup is performed to identify the user and associate the email with a unique ID or account.

Therefore, specify the Active Directory that you want to use to resolve data in email recipient fields.
Tip: Make sure that the machine that runs the IBM Content Collector server is part of the Active Directory domain. Otherwise the Email Connector might fail.
Select the type of Active Directory server to use:
  • The domain default server is one of the Active Directory servers to which the DNS lookup of the domain name resolves. If there are several Active Directory servers, IBM Content Collector picks one of them.
  • The user-defined server can be any other global catalog server. In this case, provide the following information:
    • The fully qualified host name of the Active Directory server. The global catalog must be enabled on that server.
    • The LDAP port, which is the port number for communication with the specified domain server. This is the default domain server of the domain that the specified global catalog server belongs to.
    • The global catalog port, which is the port number for network communication with the specified global catalog server.

Specify the credentials for accessing the Active Directory server. Validate your entries to ensure that you entered the correct credentials.

Processing Options

The following advanced processing options are available:
Retrieve user IDs of internal recipients and senders from Active Directory
FileNet® Email Manager retrieved the email metadata properties To User ID, CC User ID, and BCC User ID for internal recipients and senders from the Active Directory. These properties can be used, for example, to set permissions in FileNet P8. Select this option to retrieve these properties in IBM Content Collector as well. For users, the Email Connector retrieves the sAMAccountName. For groups, it retrieves the CommonName (CN). Enabling this option might impact performance of the Email Connector.
When processing journal reports for IRM-protected messages, process the original encrypted message even if a clear-text copy is available

If Information Rights Management (IRM) and journal report decryption are enabled in your Microsoft Exchange environment, journal report messages contain a clear-text copy of IRM-protected messages along with the original IRM-protected message. Depending on the setting of this option, IBM Content Collector processes the encrypted message or the clear-text message.

If you select to process the original encrypted message, the message is deduplicated with copies of the same message in user mailboxes, but the content cannot be indexed and made available for search. If you do not select this option, thus choose to process the clear-text copy of the encrypted message, a unique instance of the message is stored in the archive. As a result, the message is not deduplicated with copies of the same message in user mailboxes, but the content can be indexed and made available for search.

Select which messages are treated as journal reports
In some cases, IBM Content Collector might not recognize all envelope journal messages and might treat some journal messages as normal messages. Use this option to determine which messages should be treated as journal reports.
Setting Description
Automatic IBM Content Collector attempts to detect whether a message is a journal report message.
All All messages are treated as journal reports.
Based on format All messages that contain exactly one embedded message attachment are treated as journal reports.