Old messages resending after reboot

[matt95gsr]

Following a reboot of one of my Exchange 2000 servers, one of my users received several nasty emails this morning about old messages being resent. She originally sent the message to about 300 (external) recipients several weeks ago. Now she is being told that some of these recipients received the message anywhere from 26 to 40 times last night, about 2-3 minutes apart from one another. It all started just after the server was rebooted. I'm stumped as to how to find any info about this, or how to prevent it in the future. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[paulha]

What firewall do you have ?

 

[matt95gsr]

It is running through a cisco 2600 series router . There is no dedicated firewall.

 

[xmsre]

There were some issues with older versions of PIX not completing the smtp session. ISA had a similar issue as well. If there are any issues on the GC that exchange is using that would cause lookups to fail or timeout, you would also see a similar situation.

I've seen DNS issues cause problems like this. Like a GC issue, if lookups fail or timeout exchange will try again later.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;884421

I've also seen this on clusters where the mailroot is not on a shared drive. It's a bit different because in this case messages are "stranded" when the resource fails to another node, and delivered sometimes months later with the resource is failed back.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;883406

In any event, you should see some retryable errors from the categorizer, event ID 6004 I believe in the application log. Troubleshooting the cause of the 6004 error should resolve your issue.

 

[puz]

We are experiencing the exact same problem. Were you able to resolve this?

One of our users sent an email with 130 emails in the Bcc list and now it is being resent every time the server is rebooted (or SMTP service is restarted) It's extrememly frustrating. We have deleted this user from the Exchange database but to no avail.

Aaron

 

[matt95gsr]

No, I've been unable to resolve this issue as of yet. I'm thinking that I'll just have to manually dump whatever is in the outbound queue before I reboot. Of course, this only works in a "planned maintenance" scenario. If the server takes a crap on its own, it seems this problem will be unavoidable for now. I was actually thinking this morning about just writing a scheduled script to dump whatever is in the queue every night or so, which may help. Still looking for a solid solution to this, though.

 

[puz]

Bummer.

Thanks for the udpate. I'm a total Exchange newbie, when you talk about dumping the outbound queue, where is this? I've looked under the SMTP queue and there are no messages there, this just gets triggered automatically somehow. The only way I knew it was coming from us was puting full logging on the SMTP server.

 

[xmsre]

I thought of one other thing. If some of the recipients are external, and others are internal, then the message in undergoing content conversion and the following could apply:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/820735/en-us

 

[puz]

hey thanks, that KB article sounds close to our experience. I've never contacted MS about getting a non-posted hotfix before, it doesn't look simple. Any advice?

 

[xmsre]

Should be no big deal. This hotfix is up on the Premier site.