ORF Transport Agents are lightweight components that connect Microsoft® Exchange 2007 and newer versions to the ORF Service, the actual filtering component of ORF. Transport Agents are installed along with ORF. If these Agents get uninstalled or disabled, ORF will not be able to communicate with the underlying Exchange server and no filtering will be applied on incoming emails.
This article provides instructions to address such problems.
ORF installs two Transport Agents: the Vamsoft ORF SMTP Receive Agent (responsible for Before Arrival filtering and On Arrival filtering) and the Vamsoft ORF Routing Agent (responsible for collecting outbound email data for the Auto Sender Whitelist).
Similarly to previous Exchange versions, ORF may install the Vamsoft ORF SMTP Receive Agent and the Vamsoft ORF Routing Agent, but the local Exchange roles decide which agents are actually installed.
Both the Vamsoft ORF SMTP Receive Agent and the Vamsoft ORF Routing Agent are installed.
Only the Vamsoft ORF SMTP Receive Agent is installed.
Both the Vamsoft ORF SMTP Receive Agent and the Vamsoft ORF Routing Agent are installed.
The Vamsoft ORF SMTP Receive Agent is installed twice, once for the Front-End Transport Service of Exchange 2013 Client Access Server and once for the Hub Transport Service of Exchange 2013 Mailbox Server. The Vamsoft ORF Routing Agent is also installed.
There are several ways to check the status of Transport Agents.
The Transport Agent status is displayed on the page of the Administration Tool.
For single-server, mixed Client Access Server + Mailbox Server Exchange 2013 installations, the status displayed for the Vamsoft ORF SMTP Receive Agent is a compound status, because the agent is installed twice. The status will be "healthy" only if both agent instances are installed and enabled.
Navigate to the ORF directory where the ORF Exchange Helper executable (orfmexhelper.exe) resides (\Program Files\ORF Fusion (32-bit systems) or \Program Files (x86)\ORF Fusion (64-bit systems) by default) and issue the following command (administrator privileges are required):
Similarly to the Administration Tool, the Exchange Helper will return a compound status for the ORF SMTP Receive Agent (see box above).
Start the Exchange Management Shell and enter the following command:
As of writing this, the Exchange Management Shell should not be used to manage Transport Agents on Client Access Server installations, but local PowerShell is required with the Exchange Windows PowerShell snapin loaded. See "TransportAgent cmdlets on Client Access servers require local Windows PowerShell" section in this Microsoft® TechNet article for details.
If the ORF Transport Agents are not listed, try installing them using the ORF Exchange Helper tool using the following command (administrator privileges are required):
If the ORF Transport Agents are installed, but disabled, reinstall them using the ORF Exchange Helper tool using the following commands (administrator privileges are required):