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Microsoft's demo domain appearing all over my protocol logs "smtp.availability.contoso.com"

Question

Friday, May 19, 2017 8:10 AM

Tried this on spiceworks without much repsonse but perhaps an MS employee/expert would care to comment..

Without going into detail about the underyling issues that have got me into the received Protocol Logs here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\TransportRoles\Logs\FrontEnd\ProtocolLog\SmtpReceive

I can see "smtp.availability.contoso.com" all over the logs - example entry:

2017-05-18T13:00:38.819Z,EXCHANGE1\Default Frontend EXCHANGE1,08D49DEB8FAD4E94,2,192.168.0.33:25,192.168.0.33:42912,<,EHLO smtp.availability.contoso.com,

Needless to say I haven't set this up as a FQDN anywhere.

Should I be concerned?  If not, what are these entries signifying?

All replies (4)

Monday, May 22, 2017 9:50 AM | 1 vote

Hi,

Don't worry about it. That's by default, there are also many "smtp.availability.contoso.com" entries in my received Protocol Logs.

As far as I know, in Exchange Server, there are a series of probes that monitor the health of the different components of the servers. One of these probes monitors the health of each Frontend Transport Service and its ability to proxy messages to each of the 2016 mailbox databases in the Exchange organization.

Refer to this document for more information:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2013/08/13/customizing-managed-availability/

Best Regards,

Lynn-Li
TechNet Community Support

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Monday, June 5, 2017 8:18 AM

Thanks for your reply Lynn-Li but I must once again bemoan the lack of documentation emanating from Redmond towers nowadays (see my previous post on technet forums).

If you google "smtp.availability.contoso.com" with quotes all you see is this thread and another one by myself. This suggests to me this is either

a) badly documented, or more likely
b) a bug - ie. something included for testing in the beta code that made it into production incorrectly

Either way I would expect a reply that states a) "This will be included in the next documentation review" or b) "this is by mistake and will be excluded in the next CU."

My point being that reports such as mine on this forum are batted away by frontline staff such as yourselves when you should be escalating to the relevant dev or documentation teams.

I hope you take action accordingly.


Monday, June 24, 2019 9:51 PM | 2 votes

Two years later NOTHING has happened. Same problem in my logs...


Wednesday, June 26, 2019 7:26 AM

Ah memories.

This is another on the list of genuine problems that don't ever get escalated out of this public forum to the development teams. Or at least no feedback to the long suffering (and I'm a user from DOS 3.0) customers.