Exchange Message Tracking Center or findstr?

If you need to track down messages in Exchange, using the Message Tracking Center in ESM is probably the first place to go for information.; and for the most part that works just fine. But if you need some more detail, or need to be able to search for wildcards or other strings, you might want to consider using findstr against the log folder

Open a command prompt, browse to Exchange log folder and do a search for you’re looking for.

findstr /s /i "StringToSearch" “c:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\servername.log\*.*”

In the example, /s seraches on the current directory and subdirectories and /I indicates that the search is not case-sensitive. If you’ve not used findstr before, take a look as there are plenty of parameters you can use.

As an aside, I usually copy off the *.log files that I'm interested to a separate folder before running findstr - just so as to not get bogged down searching irrelevant logs.