Azure Hybrid & Cloud Migration Blog

Recently I happened to audit and health-check one of large Exchange 2010 customer, where we found couple of Exchange 2010 configuration items which were not configured at par with best practices. Among these configuration items we found that Transport Dumpster settings and its size for per database was not set as per best practice.

What is Exchange Transport Dumpster Feature?

Okay first of all for those who are not familiar with Exchange Transport Dumpster feature lets first get to know more about this guy. Exchange Transport Dumpster feature was first introduced in Exchange 2007 and is also available in newer version of Exchange. Exchange 2007 and on-wards Exchange Server version routes all e-mail flow via Exchange Hub Transport server, where Transport Dumpster features provides compliance and data loss prevention safety for the messages while in-transit.

Recommended configuration for Transport Dumpster

Upon auditing of Exchange messaging environments it has been seen that many Exchange Server administrator forgets to give required attention to configure correct settings for Exchange Transport Dumpster size for organization wide message transportation. As most of us know that default message size limit in Exchange 2010 comes as 10 MB, for which transport dumpster settings for dumpster size for each database is set by default to 18 MB. But when customer changes their message attachment size couple of times it has been seen that they don’t change the required settings on dumpster level.

This result of having dumpster not working at par and thus their message compliance and safety requirements goes bad.

It is recommend that your MaxDumpsterSizePerDatabase value should be set to 1.5 times of your message attachment size or allowed message size sent via Exchange Hub Transport Server.

Cheers!