Mail delay / Mailbox refresh issue in Outlook 2k

[inquisitor]

I am having an intermittent problem with mail refresh or delay using Exchange 5.5 sp4 on a Win2k sp2 advanced server, and our mail client, which is Outlook 2000. What happens is sometimes emails don't show up in the user's inbox until they click on another email, hit F5 to refresh, or click on one of their personal folders in the folder list. It is intermittent, so I can't make it happen at will. It happens with both internal and external emails. There is no queueing in the MTA or IMC. We only just started having this problem once we upgraded our exchange server to another box. The old server was running exchange 5.5 sp3 on NT 4 sp6a, but was seriously underpowered (single 500 w/256mb vs dual 733 w. 2gb on the new server). Both had mirrored OS drives on scsi with a separated raid5 array connected to a separate raid controller. The old server is still online, part of the same site, but all mailboxes have been moved to the new server. One domain. We have about 100 users using this server so it has lots of horsepower for the job.

I have read about some other people having similar problems with their outlook/exchange server, but no answers as of yet..HELP!!!!

 

[motor135]

As I understand it, Exchange notifies Outlook clients of new messages through a UDP packet sent to the Outlook client. If something is blocking that packet (such as a firewall, router or other network device), the Outlook client won't get the updates so new email doesn't show up. Of course, on the client side if the user changes folders or presses F5 to refresh, the Outlook client contacts the Exchange server for updates, which then show up.

I've seen this twice. Once when we were doing Outlook connected to Exchange through our VPN concentrator, and a 2nd time when one of our users installed a firewall software package on his workstation. In both instances, adjustments to allow the proper traffic from Exchange to the client resolved the issue.

Hope that helps - I'd be curious to see what the resolution is.

Motor