5 Tips To Keeping your Exchange Email Server Healthy

5 Tips to Keeping Exchange running smoothly (On-premise)

We know that lots of businesses are now incorporating Office 365 in their technology set. However, what if you are still using on-premise Exchange servers? Lots of firms are still using their own infrastructure, for various reasons. If you’re one of these companies, there are some essential things that need to be checked regularly, to ensure the uptime of on-premise Exchange services;

1. This one is easy – make sure you back up your Exchange Server, using an “Exchange aware” product. This not only gives you granular backups (so you can drill down to mailboxes, restore individual items etc) but it also does something else. It deletes the log files created by exchange, preventing the hard disk from filling up. If the hard disk does get to a certain level, mail will stop flowing externally, due to a condition known as back pressure.
   
2. If you aren’t using any third party anti-spam solutions, make sure to run windows update regularly. This is a good thing not only for Windows security updates, but it also updates the built in antispam definitions for Exchange server, too.
   
3. Make sure the online maintenance schedule is running nightly. This is an online defrag that is performed whilst the database remains online. You can check that it’s completed successfully by checking the event viewer, for event ID 701.
   
4. Make sure you have adequate space for your Exchange Database, and also the Exchange Queue. If you know you’re going to be getting close to less than 10% of free drive space, add some additional storage, and move the database over to it.
   
5. Prune the database for old users, and if no longer needed, backup the mailboxes, and remove them. After the online defrag has run, the mailbox size will reduce, freeing up hard drive space.