Slow Mail when mailing to internal relay domain in SBS2011

[bryanbotha]

Hey guys, I have a client who uses a domain for example contoso.com
contoso.com is managed in London and the POP mailboxes are managed in London.

Cape Town and JHB POP mail into sbs2011 exchange servers and use exchange for mail. (pop3 connectors)

contoso.com is setup as a internal relay server on both cape town and jhb server, when i send mail from @contoso.com in Cape Town to @contoso.com email address in JHB, the mail takes very long to come through and comes through in batches, sometimes as long as 7 or 8 hours after I send the mail.

Any ideas what the problem could be?

 

[ShackDaddy]

The first thing to do would be to check the outbound queues in CapeTown and see if the mail for JHB remains in the local CapeTown queue after sending it. The next thing to do, if the mail is gone from that queue but still not delivered in JHB, is to log into the corporate OWA/web mailbox for the JHB users and see if the mail is sitting up there waiting for POP to pull it down. If it is, then you are dealing with a POP latency issue. If the mail is gone from the CapeTown queue but isn't in the corp mailbox yet, then it is probably queued at corp and you should ask them to check the queue there and see why it isn't being delivered there.

So the first step is determining where the mail is getting hung up. Another good check would be to examine the message header after the mail is downloaded in JHB and see where it says it has been on each step of the way, and at what time it got there. That would also pinpoint the slow link.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[sircles]

That is all very good advice and also check what period the POP3 connector is rigged to check the email as if you do not receive delay NDRs then it might not be SMTP or X500 that is the issue.

On another note it may well be time to just connect everyone with SSL using Outlook and use a single server in a datacentre for all rather than internal relay and POP3 or perhaps Office365 or Google Apps.

It's cheaper, less licenses and less hassle.

sircles.net Support - find us at:

http://www.sircles.co.uk

http://www.sircles.net

http://www.ReadAllAboutIT.eu

Henley-on-Thames Computer Support