Pipeline Tracing Sender Address is Case Sensitive

In a recent troubleshooting case, I was wondering why the pipeline tracing target directory remained empty after enabling the Exchange 2013 CU12 transport pipeline tracing using the following cmdlet.

Set-TransportService -PipelineTracingSenderAddress john.doe@mcsmemail.de -PipelineTracingEnabled $true

In this case, the sender address itself was John.Doe@MCSMemail.de.

In past scenarios, the email address to trace was copied from the original message, so this issue never occurred.

After heading down the road on why no trace messages got logged in the pipeline tracing folder and enabling and disabling the feature several times across multiple servers, the sender address made its way into the cmdlet via Copy&Paste. And voilá… transport started tracing messages.

Set-TransportService -PipelineTracingSenderAddress John.Doe@MCSMemail.de -PipelineTracingEnabled $true

The TechNet article on pipeline tracing does not state anything about the fact that the email address attribute is case-sensitive.

If you want to enable or disable pipeline tracing across multiple Exchange 2013 servers, you might want to use the following one-liners:

# One liner to activate Pipeline Tracing on multiple Exchange 2013 servers in a co-ex scenario
Get-ExchangeServer | ?{$_.AdminDisplayVersion -ilike "*15*"} | Get-TransportService | Set-TransportService -PipelineTracingEnabled $true -PipelineTracingSenderAddress John.Doe@MCSMemail.de

# One liner to deactive Pipeline Tracing across multiple Exchange 2013 servers
Get-ExchangeServer | ?{$_.AdminDisplayVersion -ilike "*15*"} | Get-TransportService | Set-TransportService -PipelineTracingEnabled $false -PipelineTracingSenderAddress $null

Not to mention that the output stored in the pipeline tracing folders might be sensitive, as all data is stored in a readable format.

Links

• Configure pipeline tracing, Configure pipeline tracing

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Contact me at thomas@mcsmemail.de
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