Slow delivery between front end and back end server

[Mission2000]

I just setup our first front end Exchange server and everything appears to be working fine except that delivery of mail from the front end server to the back end server is slow for SMTP.

If I send an email it will immediately show up in the queue on the front end server but it takes 15 minutes to an hour before it gets delivered to the back end server. It just sits in our queue with a status of "queued" and will eventually get delivered.

What kind of seems weird to me is that in the queue are usually about 5 messages from "servername-IS@ourdomain.com" to "differentservername-IS@ourdomain.com" and they always show a status of retry. We don't have any accounts like that setup.

Any ideas?

 

[RichardHuang]

In our company, we disabled the SMTP service on the front-end server. So it delivers the email immediately from front-end to back-end.

 

[Mission2000]

I don't think that would make sense for us. Our front end server is the only server we have exposed to the internet to receive mail. If we disable SMTP, no one will be able to send us mail.

 

[RichardHuang]

Oh, right. I just realized we use a third-party email firewall to filter all incoming SMTP emails. Sorry for the confusion.