Exchange 2010 - Enabling Priority Queuing

Written by Misha Hanin

Those of you who deal with Exchange are familiar with the fact that priority emails, that are sent from Outlook or OWA can be changed very easily. Even if an email is sent with “High Importance”, it makes no difference to Exchange 2010 by default. All emails will be queued and delivered in the order they are received. This is where “Priority Queuing” comes in, and it will be useful to configure this feature, so that emails marked high priority are processed and delivered before any others in the queue, regardless of when they were received by the server.

Priority Queuing is disabled in Exchange 2010 by default. It is very easy to enable it by editing the EdgeTransport.exe.config file in the Bin directory and restart the Exchange Transport Service.

Navigate to the Bin directory and find EdgeTransport.Exe.Config file...

Open it using notepad and find the line that says PriorityQueuingEnabled is set to false:
<add key="PriorityQueuingEnabled" value="false" />

Change the value from “false” to “true” and save the file. New line should looks like:
<add key="PriorityQueuingEnabled" value="true" />

Restart Exchange Transport service.

Once this is complete, Exchange 2010 will deliver high priority emails before any other ones and normal priority emails will be delivered before the low priority ones. By default, all emails sent from Outlook & OWA have normal priority.

» Announcing Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2

Today, May 17, the Exchange Team is announce that in the second half of calendar year 2011 they will be releasing Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 (SP2). With SP2, the following new features and capabilities will be included:

» Publishing Outlook Anywhere Using NTLM Authentication With Forefront TMG or Forefront UAG

This white paper provides detailed information about publishing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 using Forefront TMG or Forefront UAG to secure access for Outlook Anywhere when using NTLM Authentication.

» Microsoft Exchange Server 2010: High Availability Deep Dive (including changes introduced by SP1)

Go far beyond the basics of Exchange High Availability and learn what's really going on under the hood in an Exchange 2010 database availability group (DAG). This session covers key aspects of the inner workings of DAGs, including a deep dive...

» Exchange 2010 Tested Solutions

In the Exchange 2010 Tested Solutions white papers, Microsoft provides examples of well-designed, cost-effective Exchange 2010 solutions deployed on hardware offered by some of our server, storage, and network partners.In the Exchange 2010 Tested...

» How to find PST files with Red Gate's new tool, PST Importer

An invaluable source of Clustering, Virtualization, Tools, Scripts and Knowledge Base for Network Administrators Worldwide

Exchange 2010 - Enabling Priority Queuing

» Announcing Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2

» Publishing Outlook Anywhere Using NTLM Authentication With Forefront TMG or Forefront UAG

» Microsoft Exchange Server 2010: High Availability Deep Dive (including changes introduced by SP1)

» Exchange 2010 Tested Solutions

» How to find PST files with Red Gate's new tool, PST Importer