A follow up to my Dell SC430 comments...

I was pricing one out today to compare for a client, and found they have LESS features than most workstations! They have no SATA Raid, forcing you to rely on software based RAID solutions, or upgrade to SCSI drives. The 73GB SCSI drives on their site are $200 more than their 80GB SATA drives, making their "small business, economy" server easily into the price range of a better equipped HP or IBM server.

Dell's bargain servers are no more than workstations.

The SC430 server is their bottom line entry level server. It's hardly a server by most any definition. It has the same components (if not worse) than most desktops available on the market today. The most basic of SC430's has an Intel Celeron chip, (read: cheapest processor on the market) SATA drives with the same RAID functionality as most home built PCs, and really has zero expandability beyond their initial configuration. Please, please stop buying the SC430. You may think you are getting a deal, but you are really just buying into equipment that will not grow with your company.

Cleaning up NDR stuffed mail queues

Came upon this, and was shocked it was not publicized more. Microsoft released a small utility a while ago called aqadmcli.exe. It's a command line interface for SMTP queue management. When a domain gets spammed a lot, many NDR's or non-delivery reports can occur, filling the queue with messages that may never get delivered. This utility allows you to set flags, and delete messages based on these flags. For example, you can use it to delete all mail with the "FROM" being "postmaster@yourdomain.com" to remove (very very quickly compared to the GUI ESM tool) all emails sent from postmaster@yourdomain.com (which are most likely all the NDR's that are clogging their SMTP queue.