I have an exchange 5.5 Server that sits on Windows NT 4.0. Once a week, one of our users sends out an email to a about 2000 users, sort of a weekly update. For the last month or so, We have been getting lots of people saying they get the email 5 times over the course of several days. I cannot tell that anything is wrong with the server. We do restart the server every morning, and one thing I was thinking was that maybe some are stuck and keep getting resent when the server starts, but nothing shows in the queue? Any suggestions?
Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
Exchange Keeps sending emails over and over
- Thread starter sfortner
- Start date
Why do you restart the server daily? I cannot think of any reason to do this, but I can think of several not to.
Is the message originator sending his message only to individual mailboxes, or is he/she sending to every address in the GAL? If the list of addressees includes distribution lists, users would get one copy of the message for each distribution list they belong to plus one for their individual mailbox. You should create a distribution list that conatins everyone in your organization and limit who can send to that list using the delivery restrictions tab of the properties page.
I can't think why this would occur over several days unless your server is just very slow.
This may not have helped, but I fell better
Is the message originator sending his message only to individual mailboxes, or is he/she sending to every address in the GAL? If the list of addressees includes distribution lists, users would get one copy of the message for each distribution list they belong to plus one for their individual mailbox. You should create a distribution list that conatins everyone in your organization and limit who can send to that list using the delivery restrictions tab of the properties page.
I can't think why this would occur over several days unless your server is just very slow.
This may not have helped, but I fell better
- Thread starter
- #3
No, this is not the GAL, these are a bunch of individual contacts in the user's Outlook Contacts that they have created. We looked into the possibility that there were individual contacts as well as Distribution Lists, but there is no crossover.
We restart the server every morning because it is an old server and seems to work better with its resources refreshed. However, I don't know if something in Exchange is hiccupping and then resending a lot of these emails out again when it restarts.
Thanks.
We restart the server every morning because it is an old server and seems to work better with its resources refreshed. However, I don't know if something in Exchange is hiccupping and then resending a lot of these emails out again when it restarts.
Thanks.
Sounds like something I may have dealt with before.
Are the users who are receiving this over and over outlook express users on a slow connection trying to download a large attachment? Not sure if Outlook is affected the same way, but if using it in an internet email config, it may be the same.
If so, the issue may be that outlook express is timing out while downloading the attachment and looses connection to the server. Outlook Express will not clear the email it has downloaded from the server until all email on the server has been downloaded. Only then does it clean the server off. That is, unless "leave a copy on the server" is checked in the client options on the advanced tab. When Outlook connects to the server next time, it will get to that same message and do the same thing. It will get stuck in this loop until the large email is deleted.
If there are emails in front of the large one, they too will continue to download over and over. Also, if there is more than one large attachment, the fix will have to be done for each. If this is the fix for you that is.
One thing the user can try for Outlook Express, and Outlook in Internet email config is to go to tools, options, advanced tab, and move the time out from 1 minute to 5. That will give it 4 more minutes to get that attachment down. That may be the easy solution, but depends on the speed of connection, and the size of the attachment.
If that still does not work, if you have WebMail through Outlook Web Access, they can log into that and delete the large email. Even though Outlook is timing out on them, the last message (the large one) is fully downloaded to the client and should be ok to delete from the server. However, you may want to have the client confirm that first.
Hope this solves the issue for you.
Are the users who are receiving this over and over outlook express users on a slow connection trying to download a large attachment? Not sure if Outlook is affected the same way, but if using it in an internet email config, it may be the same.
If so, the issue may be that outlook express is timing out while downloading the attachment and looses connection to the server. Outlook Express will not clear the email it has downloaded from the server until all email on the server has been downloaded. Only then does it clean the server off. That is, unless "leave a copy on the server" is checked in the client options on the advanced tab. When Outlook connects to the server next time, it will get to that same message and do the same thing. It will get stuck in this loop until the large email is deleted.
If there are emails in front of the large one, they too will continue to download over and over. Also, if there is more than one large attachment, the fix will have to be done for each. If this is the fix for you that is.
One thing the user can try for Outlook Express, and Outlook in Internet email config is to go to tools, options, advanced tab, and move the time out from 1 minute to 5. That will give it 4 more minutes to get that attachment down. That may be the easy solution, but depends on the speed of connection, and the size of the attachment.
If that still does not work, if you have WebMail through Outlook Web Access, they can log into that and delete the large email. Even though Outlook is timing out on them, the last message (the large one) is fully downloaded to the client and should be ok to delete from the server. However, you may want to have the client confirm that first.
Hope this solves the issue for you.
- Thread starter
- #5
- Thread starter
- #7
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
- Helpful tip
- Locked
- Question
- Locked
- Question