Exchange 2000's Pickup Folder

I've found Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server's Pickup folder, located at \exchsrvr\mailroot\vsi 1\Pickup, useful for having replication reports delivered to my Inbox twice a day. On my network, I shared the folder as \\ExchangeServerName\pickup. If you save a suitably headed text file to the folder, the Exchange server treats the text file as a mail message and sends the file to the mailbox in the To: field.

I created the batch file in Listing 2 to generate the test file diag.txt and copy the file to Exchange 2000's Pickup folder for delivery. This batch file deletes the existing (i.e., previously run) text file and creates the appropriate mail headers at the beginning of the new text file. The y.dat file contains the letter y and carriage return/line feed (CRLF). The dcdiag /f option appends the dcdiag results with the /e enterprise option. The /s option directs dcdiag to a nearby domain controller (DC). I use the Flexible Single-Master Operation (FSMO) roles for the enterprise. The last line copies the diag.txt file to Exchange 2000's Pickup folder, where Exchange obtains the file to deliver it to my mailbox as a message. I scheduled the repcheck.cmd batch file to run twice a day under Domain Administrator privileges.

—Jim Swift
jswift@sd70.bc.ca

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