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A Quick One on MRM Journaling Vs. Envelope Journaling

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Messaging Records Management (MRM 1.0) has a feature which enables you to “journal” a message that falls under a MRM policy.

Here is a screenshot of it from Exchange 2007 GUI

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And while MRM 1.0 has been deprecated in Exchange 2010 and later for Retention Policies (MRM 2.0) you can still set it in the shell in that version here-

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The key to note here (and purpose of this post) is that MRM journaling is different from “standard” transport envelope journaling (the kind you create a journal rule for or enable at the per-MDB level).

You can read more about transport journaling here.

In fact it’s more accurate to refer to MRM 1.0 “journaling” with its real name- AutoCopy, since this is not meant to be an actual compliance solution.

So here are the differences to be aware of-

Transport journaling is handled by the hidden (in Exchange 2010) journal agent on the hub servers.

MRM AutoCopy is handled by the Managed Folder Assistant which is a mailbox assistant on the mailbox server.

The sender/recipient addresses in an MRM AutoCopy report are in Legacy Exchange DN format while a transport journal report is SMTP.

MRM AutoCopy reports do not show results of DL expansion. Transport journal reports do.

MRM AutoCopy reports do not show BCC recipients. Transport journal reports do.

Both Transport Journaling and MRM 1.0 AutoCopy will set the X-MS-Journal-Report header.

Finally and perhaps most importantly to note- Ii you enable a mailbox for Transport envelope journaling (journal rule or per-MDB) AND that mailbox also has a MRM 1.0 AutoCopy policy applied “duplicate” reports will be generated.

I write “duplicate” in quotes since as we have read the two are very different.

See below-

Example of transport journal report-

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Example of MRM 1.0 journal report-

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In short Exchange Transport Journaling is a robust compliance feature.

MRM 1.0 AutoCopy is not meant to be a replacement for true Journaling and its successor and ultimate replacement Retention Policies (MRM 2.0), do not have the ability to AutoCopy.

In fact in Exchange 2013 there is no more MRM 1.0 so the AutoCopy feature has been completely removed from that version of the product.