Non-Delivery Messages 1

[proudusa]

I'm getting non-delivery for e-mails being sent out of outlook 2000 which are configured with an external POP/SMTP server in their properties. Mailboxes are stored on an Exchange 5.5 server. The server is used to store mail and do collaborative work but does not have IMS (SMPT).

Clients are able to receive e-mails but unable to send. They get: Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: test
Sent: 5/16/2003 3:22 PM

The following recipient(s) could not be reached:

'user@test.com' on 5/16/2003 3:22 PM
No transport provider was available for delivery to this recipient.

On the client side i'm seeing:

win98/ME: After exiting outlook following non-delivery receipt you get an error: MAPISP32.exe caused an invalid page fault in module rtfhtml.dll

Windows 2000: After exiting outlook following non-delivery receipt you get an error MAPISP32.EXE. The instruction at "....." referenced memory @ "...". The memory could not be read.

Have tried KB 318658 and KB 813741 with no luck. Problem must be central as it's all outlook clients that cannot send. Could be:

E-mail provider (says nothing going on there)
Firewall blocking (nothing has changed i'm not seeing anything specific logged)
Exchange server (only stores the mailboxes with mail and not used as SMTP or POP/IMAP server)

Please advice or point in right direction.

 

[jonarden]

Check thread 10-556884 "AOL & Outlook Nightmare" for other Outlook POP 3 access comments & info.

 

[proudusa]

HI guys, i apologize for being out of the loop for a few days. I was quickly reviewing some of the posts since my last one and do find it quite interesting/troubling that 3-4 of us within hours all had the same problem.

*As for drive space, i had several gigs of free space on the drive.
*I had Exchange 5.5 SP3 on Win2K SP2 running.
*AV is Panda
*No errors were reported in the event viewer except for the notification of the NDR listed as EVENTID 290.
*When i moved mailboxes to a personal folder that also solved the issue but obviously not a great solution.
*Jonarden...the AOL issue sounds like a possibility for some except e-mails being sent of this office were going to non-aol addresses.

So far i haven't encountered anything similar once i moved over to another box with the same setup.

Very intersting.......hope we can get to the bottom of this for future encounters.

 

[calsac]

Hi all,

We shut our servers down on May 19 for a week while we were moving offices. We are running the same config - EX 5.5 and OLK 2K in Corporate /workgroup mode with both internet mail and the exchange server in the profile (mail is collected and sent via the internet and stored in an exchange mailbox).

We got our DSL hooked back up yesterday and everyone was able to recieve and send their mail today but around noon the "send" part went down. I did find the following article that might apply:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=245446

I'll be watching this post to see if there is any more news.

 

[ALAN1980]

twillboy, the reason may be that the 98/95 users are storing their data on the server and the 2000 and xp are using Personal Folders.

jonarden, I did get event 1221 for my priv. I copied both priv and pub to another computers. I then copied Esutil Utility and related files to this computer. I used the Esutil.exe to do a manual defrag. My problem is that I do not know how to put it back in the production server. Do you just copy priv and pub back to the Exchange Server? I think I will setup another Exchange Server to run some tests. By the end of this I think I will either be a Exchange Expert or I may be looking for a new job??

 

[twillboy]

Okay. Got the file sizes on both the priv and pub files. They are 8 Gb and 12 MB respectively.

I will never say "not", but I don't think that hd size on this machine is the issue at hand simply because the administrator says that they have had as little as 200 MB at one time and everything worked like a charm. Now I realize that they still need to find a fix for this problem in and of itself, but I think that issue is secondary to the outlook/exchange issue.

I have a few events that look related to the problematic time frame but none looks like a specific pointer to the problem.

11:14 AM
Event=290 Source=MSExhangeMTA Category=X400
Service
"A non-delivery report is being generated for message =US ; A= ; P=Waverly"

11:34 AM/ 11:48 AM
Event=2042 Source=MSExchangeSA Category=general
"Unable to get the AppleTalk Network address of the Microsoft Exchange Server computer"

11:35 AM + multiple entries
Event=1216 Source=MSExchangeIS Public
Category=general
"Information store limited to 16 GB"

11:35 AM
Event=11507 Source=MSExchange Pop3 Category=general
"Ready to accept client on the POP3 interface"

Obviously one related to hard drive space and exchange themselves, one now accepting clients for pop3, a non delivery address and one about Appletalk network address which they don't use. That's obviously not the whole log and I haven't looked at the log yet, but that's what i've got so far.

 

[calsac]

FYI, went in today and installed Popcon, removed Internet Mail service from all of the Oulook clients and everything seems to be working ok now. It also sets us up to use OWA if we want to. I had to add internet mail service to the Exchange 5.5 server as it was not necessary before but it now used to send outgoing mail.

 

[ALAN1980]

twillboy, you do have a problem if your priv is 8gb and the drive it is located in is only 15gb. This means that your priv has not been defrag for a long time. Because during the the defrag process it would need 8.8gb of free space to create a copy of the priv during the defrag process.

If you check your log files you will discover that the priv files defrag process has been interrupted because of this.

I think my problem is related to the fact I do not have enough room to defrag too. When I manually defrag my priv file (on a test computer) the file when from 11GB to 9GB. Anyway, I am upgrading from 15GB drive to 36GB on my Exchange server and letting the defrag take care both the priv and pub files. I'm hoping this will solve my problem. Anyway, maybe this is what we all have in common. Not enough disk space to defrag priv and pub. If the rest of you can check your logs to confirm this we may be on the road to a solution.

 

[jonarden]

ALAN1980, twillboy For useful details on doing an offline defrag on another non-Exchange server that has available drive space see MS Knowledge Base articles KB244525 "How to Run Eseutil on a Computer Without Exchange Server", KB192185 "How to defragment with the Eseutil Utility (Eseutil.exe)" & KB255035 "How to Recover Hard Disk Space from Exchange Databases".
ALAN1980 Yes, after Eseutil has been run on the databases on another computer using the directions in the articles above, move the databases back to Exchange, BUT move the original (uncompacted) databases to another location first just in case there's problem with the defragged databases and you have to return to the original databases.

 

[proudusa]

calsac: After installing POPCon, do you have the exchange server in a dmz or still in the lan behind a firewall? For OWA you would need it accessible on the net directly right?

In response to the posts:

I'm again looking at my logs from the day the problem occurred. The only errors are the event id 290 which is the NDR and i now notice event ID 1025 which is a function name or description problem. Event ID 1025 started that morning.

The articles mentioning the Internet Mail Service and Exchange Service conflict seem to be what may have happend. THough it was running perfectly for over two years in that configuration.

Hard drive space i had about 1GB left in a 6GB Drive. No errors related to defragmentation were listed but from what you other guys experience, maybe it's related.

 

[calsac]

Hi produsa,

The server is behind a firewall router on the LAN. If I add owa, I assume I will have to add an instruction to the router to send http traffic to the internal IP address of the server. POPCon is running on the same server and does not mind going through the firewall to fetch the mail. I forgot to add that the Exchange IMS is also necessary for POPCon to deliver the mail it collects to Exchange.

I have some users that VPN in and this set up should also require less maintenance re: keeping their remote (home) e-mail settings - they will no longer need to have the internet mail service on their remote outlook clients, which will cut down on VPN traffic.

I hope this set up stays stable . . .

 

[proudusa]

Sounds good Calsac. I have a similar setup with users and VPN traffic into the network for outlook data. I'm looking right now at setting something similar up to help reduce maintenance and traffic outside the network.

Thanks for the info and good luck with the setup!

 

[pikk]

Same problem...started on the 25-27th of May. Only some of my pc's here are having the problem so far. Mainly because some of us use a Linux box for our SMTP. In any event...we have been configured this way for the last 2+ years. Running Outlook and Exchange 5.5. I've always setup our Internet mail thru Outlook...POP and SMTP without issues.

Suddenly now...we get NDR's everytime we send internet mail out thru Outlook. Go figure!

BTW. I'm in Ottawa Ont and we use Magma.ca.

Pikk

 

[proudusa]

Do any of the above issues apply?

 

[pikk]

Well, yes...most do. As I said...I have always had our Exchange server setup the same way. For the longest time, everyone here 30+ people, have always used Outlook to send and receive internet mail...as well as Exchange mail.

I've checked Exchange and do not see any strange errors or event logs. All I know is that our ISP's mail server went down on or around the 26th and since then...several mahcines are unable to send internet email thru Outlook. Creating a new profile in Outlook and setting it for only internet mail, works fine. Which leads me to believe the problem is directly related to Exchange Server.

I'm stumped though. My next step is to delete one of my accounts (that doesn't work anymore) and re-add it.

Pikk

 

[proudusa]

You don't get any error message on the logs either? For some reason it looks like the configuration,that after reading the kb articles referenced above microsoft does not recommend, may have finally died. If everyone was running for two years or so with no problems and also with 30+ people. The KB articles do state that the problem is more likely to arise as an organization grows.

 

[pikk]

I see your point but at one time...we were at appx 43-45 people on staff...all using Exchange. We've actually declined a bit due to the economy and all.

Anyway...here's a little something interesting though. I just tried a little fix (if you want to call it that) on one of my systems here and it worked. They have their internet mail back. Basically all I did was remove their Exchange service from Outlook...leaving it in tact on the Server. Then, I went into their mailbox configuration on the Server and removed and re-added all of the mail protocols. Then, I added back the Exchange service in Outlook and voila! Works now. Very bizarre. I'm going to try this on others and let you know.

P

PS. Thanks for keeping up the dialog.

 

[calsac]

pikk, proudusa,

Question - what do you see as the advantages of the configuration we all had? For me, I was reluctant to set my MX records to my exchange server due to the reliability of my internet connection. Now that the POPCon utility seems to have solved the problem for $60, I am wondering if there is any advantage in going back to my old configuration if the problem gets solved.

 

[proudusa]

Pikk

I like it! Let me know if that solves the issue on all of the desktops. Pretty weird that it happend to all of us at one time though, pretty much within days of each other.

 

[pikk]

I will be trying it out on the weekend as my day here has come to an end...finally! Probably on Sunday. I will certianly let everyone know.

As for alternatives?? Maybe installing IMS on Exchange and using it as the SMTP server. Otherwise, for us? I may just move all outgoing internet mail to use our Linux boxes SMTP service....if all else fails.

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Pikk

 

[proudusa]

Calsac,

I inherited the current configuration of IMS and Exchange service running on the client side. I have been looking into changing it to the server running POP/IMAP and SMTP for some time but just haven't had time. As the only person doing the job of many time is hard to find.

I would suggest keeping the setup with POPCon. Having the server do all the work prevents multiple points of entry for viruses, etc. It also allows you to set up a central e-mail filter for spam if you'd like. In addition to that, web access to e-mail now becomes an option.