Consider disabling Exchange MTA stacks service in Exchange 2003.

Exchange Message Transfer Agent stacks service provides Microsoft Exchange x.400 services. Exchange x.400 services are used for connecting to Exchange 5.5 servers. You may consider to disable MTA stacks service in Exchange 2003 if you don't have Exchange 5.5 in your enviroment.

Microsoft does not support disabling MTA stacks in Exchange 2000. Because this service is core operational service for Exchange 2000 and also required for to correctly process mailbox moves and other additional core processes. This behaviour has been removed in Exchange 2003.

I disabled ExMTA with guidance of following article (KB810489). As described in article, you must do some settings for not to get some error. If you are using mom agent to monitor excahge, remove MsExchangeMTA from Monitored Services value under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange MOM" key. I have several mbx store so i wrote following batch file to enter “Gateway in Threads” and “Gateway out Threads” values to registry easily.

@Echo off

//Change following ID’s and servername with yours

set storelist=Private-259fb6c9-1894-467b-b354-8302d1f72973 Private-32e11f31-6cf8-4cda-a839-9e4bcd5fa13a Private-31fe4a60-a306-48f8-abff-5082ddd01f1e

for %%i in (%storelist%) do (
echo Setting %%i ...

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\<servername>\%%i /v "Gateway In Threads" /t REG_DWORD /d 0

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\<servername>\%%i /v "Gateway Out Threads" /t REG_DWORD /d 0

)

echo.
Echo Command Completed