Windows SMTP Service Mailroot Folders

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It may be deprecated in Server 2012, but the built in SMTP service is still extremely useful and is likely to be around for some time yet.

When used for bulk emails it's handy to be able to process the non-delivery receipts, but the mailroot folders often cause confusion, particularly badmail.

If the from address accepts mails, the SMTP service will send the NDR to that address and won't keep a copy of the NDR.
If the from address is not valid or rejects inbound mail (e.g. no-reply@contoso.com) then a copy is stored in badmail along with two other files (possibly not relevant to your post-processing).

To keep all NDRs, change the settings in the SMTP service to send the them to an email address. I use undelivered@machine.domainname where machine.domainname is the name showing under domains in the SMTP service's GUI.
Doing this stores all the NDRs in the local drop folder for later processing.

 Another thing to watch out for is the FQDN field in the Delivery|Advanced Settings. By default this will be the FQDN of the SMTP host server. Most likely this won't cause you any problems, but this name does go into the header of the emails for the EHLO value. Some mail servers look at the EHLO and the source IP address and if the Reverse Ptr for the IP address doesn't resolve to the EHLO value the mail will be rejected.
The sensible precaution is to update the FQDN to match the public domain name of the IP address.


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