Delayed Receipt of email

[amwoolf]

Using Exchange 2003, Outlook 2003 and 2002. With internal email, some users receive their email almost instantly after a person hits the send key while other people can take several minutes. One example, an email was sent by 1 person to 3 other people. Immeditaly after the send key was clicked, the email appeared in 2 of the receipents mail box. However, the 3rd person did not reveive the email for a couple of minutes. Even though he constantly it the send/receive key, nothing appeared for a while. Looking at the history of the message in exchange it appeared that it was received and delivered immediately to all people.

This is happening with several people but I can't determine why. Any suggestions?

 

[ShackDaddy]

Is there anything in common with those trouble workstations? Are they all on the same VLAN? Do they have Windows Firewall enabled? Are any of the workstations also set up for POP3 access to an outside mailserver?

ShackDaddy

 

[amwoolf]

haven't been able to find anything in common with the workstations. They do have Windows Firewall enabled but I disabled that on my own computer and I still have delayed receipt - only about 40 sec on my case. I also found an articel on MS knowledgebase about this and it said to place Outlook.exe in the Windows firewall program exception list. I did this with a Group Policy but still no luck. We bought some new computers and these are all configured with a new standard config and tried one of these and same problem. No POP3 access on these.

 

[ShackDaddy]

Try turning off email antivirus on one of the delayed receipt workstations and see if things change. On a local workstation, messages can end up queued for AV scan and get held up there if somethings amok with the AV settings. Also, if you have Policy Patrol or some other SarbanesOxley compliance app running, you might see the same thing. For that matter, Policy Patrol and other message scanning applications on your server can cause all sorts of slowdowns.

I'll keep looking into this for you.

ShackDaddy

 

[amwoolf]

Good idea. There is AV software on each desktop. I will check to see how it is configured - I am only there a few days each week as a consultant so I don't know how everything is currently configured. No SarbanessOxley sw (they are a private company). However, they do use MailSweeper but internal email should not be going thru this - only external incoming mail. Will need to verify this as well. Will let you know if/what I find.

 

[amwoolf]

Did some testing - AV software doesn't affect anything. However, found this article in MS database

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;839226

This references the XP firewall blocking UDP connections from the Exchange server. Looked at the fw log and sure enought that was happening. Set a GP to permit Outlook to be exempted from the XP firewall. Now I consistently reeceive emails every 18 seconds.

Question now is: why 18 seconds? Is there an Exchange parameter to speed this up? Where I used to work we received email almost instantly when someone internal sent something to us.

 

[ShackDaddy]

Typically in corporate environments, the XP firewall is turned off by Group Policy, since it gets in the way of large-scale administration. I'm always running into this as a fly in my ointment when I'm helping out with smaller businesses.

As far as the 18 seconds, sounds like the anti-spam "tar-pitting" feature of Exchange 2000. I wouldn't expect you to see these delays with in-house mail (assuming standard MAPI connections to the server), but for mail in from the outside, you can expect this delay, which is intended to foil mass-mailers. For more on this, you can read the following article:

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Windows-based-SMTP-Tar-Pitting-Explained.html

To determine whether this is the thing affecting you, you can go to this place in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SMTPSVC\Parameters

and edit the TarPitTime parameter. Setting it to 0 would disable it. Then restart the SMTP service and do some testing.

ShackDaddy

 

[amwoolf]

Forgot to post this this afternoon...

Company is using Exchange 2003. Some clients are Outlook 2002 and some 2003.

On my computer using Outlook 2003, I disabled the Cached Exchange Mode (new feature in Outlook 2003 that is suppossed to improve performance, etc.). Once I disabled this emails were received instanteously. A person would click the send key and before he could even finish saying he sent the mail it popped up on my screen.

Now, if I could figure why the Outlook 2002 clients don'e respond this way. They are still at the 18 sec delay.

The CFO at the company is bugging me as to why this is happening since he is the one who started this whole thing and I really want to get him off of my back. And I have never done anyting with Exchange until now! Learning by fire :=)

 

[amwoolf]

This article in the MS database fixes the problems with the delayed receipt of email on Outlook 2000 and 2002.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;839226

Not all computers with Outlook 2002 required the Registry updates.

For Outlook 2003, the fw change and disabling Use Cached Exchange mode fixes everything and email notifications pop up immediately.

Thanks for your assistance.