Pending submission queues are huge

[ladyoclass1]

I have Exchange 2003 running on a Win2k3R2 server. We host multiple domains on the server.
The problem is that clients are complaining that email takes up to 12 hours to arrive. When I look in the queues, the Messages pending submission queue has about 4,000 messages and DNS messages pending submission queue has about 500. What is causing these to become so big and not emptying?

Any help on this is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[xmsre]

Ftom

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823489/en-us:

Queue: Messages pending submission
First Available: Exchange 2000 Service Pack 2
Description: This queue holds messages that have been acknowledged and accepted by the SMTP service. Messages that are in this queue have not been processed.
Troubleshooting: If messages are constantly accumulating, you may have a performance problem. Occasional peaks in CPU performance can cause messages to appear in this queue intermittently. Frequently, problems with event sinks (for example, custom SMTP processing code for antivirus screening and for disclaimers) cause messages to accumulate in this queue.

 

[ladyoclass1]

Thank you xmsre,

I did find that information online as well but I haven't had an performance issues. As a matter of fact, it seems to be running smoother than I had hoped for.
What I did find is that there were quite a few messages (4000) that didn't have a sender or a recipient. These messages also had an expirarion year of 1016.
I managed to clear them out or they would eventually go the DNS pending submission queue and I would delete them from there. As they were processing, I had an enourmaous amount of NDRs that were going nowhere.

Now the server is running smoothly again.
Does anyone know what would cause and/or allow messages like that to be accepted?

 

[Marcs41]

Most likely the are the result of e-mail spoofing.
Check google and you will find lots of reasons why this happens.

Marc
[sub]If 'something' 'somewhere' gives 'some' error, expect random guesses or no replies at all.
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