Exchange and WAN problem

[ExhangeNeebie]

Hello there,

I am still a newbie in managing Exchange 5.5 in my firm. I am reading up on it but NOT fast enough. We had a crisis yesterday and from some unknown reason, everyone in the office was not able to receive and send emails in and out of the office. Everyone was able to receive / send internal emails. They were able to connect to the Internet, which Exchange was down. I have attempted to reboot DNS/DHCP servers and the Exchange but no joy in bring Exchange back up. After resetting the router to the public switch on the network, Exchange was back up, so I assume the blockage is at the upper level of the OSI layer.

Since the server were down for more than 1/2 day, all the receive emails coming in must reside somewhere on the network. I’ve checked the Exchange Admin console and see that another Exchange server there. I really need your help with step by step instructions or (where to look) as to how to recover undelivered message while our Exchange server was down.

Thank you in advance.

ExchangeNewbie

 

[cmeagan656]

Incoming email resides on the SENDER's mail server or ISP until that server can connect to yours. It depends on what the SENDER's server has set for the retry period as to when you will receive the mail or when it will be bounced back.

In our case, to eliminate large SMTP queues we've set the retry period at 5 min then 10min later, then 15 minutes later. It then tries again for 3 30 min intervals (i.e an email failing to send at 12:00 would try again at 12:05, 12:15, 12:30, 1:00, 1:30, and 2:00. After that, the mail bounces back to sender). Our retry periods are set low by design. Some ISPs / Exchange Admins have retry periods that span several days.

Cheers.