Please Help! Excessive delivery times/Deferals... I am desperate :(

[rockgeneral]

I am a bit of a newbie with NMS. I am running 4.15 p7 on a NT4 Server SP6. My server performs well with 90% of my message traffic however I am having persistent trouble with mail being sent to a few domains. When my end-users send email to users at the mail server mail.hs.utc.com there mail is delivered, however it takes between 5-20 hours. I have ruled out my firewall and everything seems to be in order with my DNS/MX information.

I have performed several tests and checked the SMTP logs which show continual connections to the mail server. However after the connection is made delivery doesn't follow. The messages for some reason are being deferred. Like I mentioned above I am new to this and perhaps the answer is right in front of my face in the log file, but I just cannot seem to find it.

Below are some of the deferal messages:

General Notice: SMTP-
Deliver:H9Y9QY01.800:<189a3680.3680189a@valcor.com>eferred
:hs.utc.com:<tomiervolino@valcor.com>:2029:1:<chuck.gilbreth
@hs.utc.com>

General Notice: SMTP-
Deliver:H9YGA200.301:<3E4413EA.87B6536A@valcor.com>eferred
:comcast.net:<bnye@valcor.com>:1636:1:<dkiselow@comcast.net>

General Notice: SMTP-
Deliver:H9YGC100.900:<3E441431.82CA62B@valcor.com>eferred:
hs.utc.com:<bnye@valcor.com>:813:1:<brian.austin@hs.utc.com>

Over and over again throughout the day I see log entries like the ones below showing connections to the mail servers for the above domains, however the messages do not get delivered.

General Information: Connected to [192.249.46.81] for
domain hsex01nt.hsd.utc.com
General Information: Connected to [192.249.46.37] for
domain hs.utc.com

These &quot;Connected to...&quot; messages appear dozens and dozens of times throughout the log yet it takes hours for the server to actually make a proper exchange of the email.

In the case of comcast, many users at comcast never receive the messages at all. And yet some comcast users receive mail from us just fine. On the other hand hs.utc.com domain users always receive our mail. (It just takes many hours.)

If anyone can help me out with this I would greatly appreciate it. I am under intense pressure from the &quot;powers-that-be&quot; at my company to get this resolved. I resolution would help me sleep better at night

Regards,

Michael George

 

[spinny]

The deferred error is an indication of a connection error with the recieving server. If you have no problem with 90-95% of your mail, I would be talking to the network administrators at the other end to see if they have any other domains with similar problems. Check the index on your servers help files for a deferred explanation.

You can speed up the time that the server makes a retry on sending these messages by:

Open Netscape admin console then
open your mail server console then
click on the configuration tab then
click on Message Que then
click on the configuration tab for message que then
check the Message Que process interval - the default is 1 hour (if a server isn't available the message is queued and tryed again in one hour, if still not available it waits for another hour, etc) , try changing it to 5 or 10 minutes and see if it solves your problem. (Save and restart) I'm not sure if you need to restart your server because I always restart my server whenever I make a change. You can also click back on the Queued Messages tab and see which messages are waiting for delivery.

This will retry a delivery every 10-15 minutes instead of waiting hours and possibly missing the chance to catch a good connection....


As a norm I end with few
Good luck

Spinny