24 hour delay in mail delivery from several domains 1

[Amye63]

We are experiencing a 24 hour delay in mail delivery to our users from certain domains. Occasionally, the mail comes through right away, but most times there is a large delay.

 

[brontosaurus]

what's between your server and the internet? turn up smtp logging to see if the messages from this domain are reaching you long before delivery. if not, it could be a device between you and the internet...

 

[Amye63]

Thanks for your response!

Our current conifig is :

Exchange---Switch----Pix---Switch---Router.

I have turned on SMTP logging. Some domains get a non-delivery report back and we do not ever get these emails. The other domains that take 24 hours for the mail to deliver, say they see the following in their SMTP logs

not able to establish a connection with our server

Thanks again for your help!

 

[brontosaurus]

on the PIX, do you have the "fixup smtp" command enabled? I've seen this type of issue occur due to that command, which limits smtp conversations to a smaller command set, so you might try disabling it with "no fixup smtp".

 

[Amye63]

Our PIX did have the "fixup smtp" commmand. I took it out, so we will run today and see if that fixed the problem. I will let you know. Thanks!

 

[jsd2003]

I bet "not able to establish..." is not the complete error message. If the PIX doesn't fix it, get the complete error message (if possible).

Sounds like the time-out issue I and a few others have had recently.

 

[Amye63]

The Pix command seemed to fix our problem. Thank you so much. You saved me a lot time. Thanks again!

 

[brontosaurus]

Great news. You're very welcome.

 

[Amye63]

Hi. We are still having this problem. Sometimes it takes up to 4 days to reveive email. One strange thing is this only seems to happen when they send a new email to us. If they respond to one of our emails, we get it right away.

 

[Claudek]

Perhaps a bit simplified, but has to be asked. Are your MX settings fine? If misconfigured or with a wrong address as the primary MX record, email will be delayed till it gets to the secondary MX records.
Probably not true in your case but this is a common error companies with non-static public addresses get. The DNS entries for their MX records don't get updated straight away (cometimes not for days till someone calls the ISP up) and as such external email cannot find the right address to deliver email to.


Claudius (What certifications??)

http://www.iteq.com.au

 

[Amye63]

I believe they are right. Here is a little more information.

We moved last year and received a different range of public IPs from our ISP. Our old publix MX record was 166.90.163.134. Our new address as of last November is 66.118.31.132. We only have two customers that send us email and we do not receive it for about 24 hours. I have verified over and over again with the guys who host our dns record that our MX record is the correct IP address. But here is what one of the customers has to say about the problem:

Right after I sent this I was finally able to catch the problem as it was happening. I noticed that all of the sudden yakko.advantatech.com started reporting 166.90.163.34 instead of the previous address I mentioned (see the ping results below).

After flushing the DNS cache it started reporting the correct address again. Would you have any idea why we would suddenly start getting the wrong address for this? I’ll keep checking from my end.

C:\>ping yakko.advantatech.com
Pinging yakko.advantatech.com [166.90.163.34] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 166.90.163.34:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms