Exchange was down all night… Message Tracking log full

This morning, no Exchange email was being delivered. After looking into the problem, I found out that the C:\ drive was full, and the cause of this was due to the Message Tracking log being full in c:\Exchsvr\POSTAL.log. one of the file was 40Gb big. Of course, I didn’t try to open that 40Gb text file, but it was the obvious reason why things had stopped working.

To resolve the issue, I stopped the Message Tracking service, in Exchange System Manager, and, deleted the tracking logs from January 1st through January 13th (the 13th was the 40Gb file), and then re-enabled the message tracking logging. I then setup automatic pruning of that log for any logs older than 15 days, to avoid future occurrences of the same sort. Granted, this 40 Gb log file would’ve still fallen within the 15 day limit, so even this measure wouldn’t have prevented this from happening.

Unfortunately, the logs that actually show a clear indication of disk space full were truncated as they had filled the event logs and auto-pruned, but there are other indications in the system log that suggest that this has started sometime around 8:36pm on 01/19/2010.

unfortunately, due to the C drive being full, Exchange was unable to hold the email that was incoming during the time it was down, and therefore was unable to re-deliver once the system was back up.

Email is now back up and operational.

• The change to Exchange was made on 01/20/2010 @ 7:45am