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SMTP Queue Problem

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kmagy

MIS
Oct 21, 2003
38
JO
Hi every body

I have exchange 2000, the messages are stacked in the queue, the queue folder have 96 MB of messages

Please help
 
Yeah, but there are other queues with legitimate email that are stuck just the same.
 
The 4 or 5 could very well be trouble at the receiving end. Pull one up and call the admin at the receiving end to see if they're having problems then.

Good luck.

I'm Certifiable, not certified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.
 
I'm assuming you are able to send/receive emails generally, and only want to clear those queues that are stuck. You could delete away those queues with messages from the postmaster if you think it is alright.Sometimes stuck queues can be due to one email in the queue (usually the oldest). Deleting this old message in the queue and restarting the Exchange services MSEXCHANGE Routing Engine and MSEXCHANGE SA can resolve the problem.
 
Just to clarify what's going on...

The majority of emails get stuck in a queue. Sometimes you can send an email and it will go straight away, but there are quite a few domains for which emails simply get stuck.

The user firstly gets a message saying that their email is delayed, but they don't need to resend it. After about 2 days, the messages time out with an NDR error code of 4.4.7.

Also, what can happen is the emails are stuck in the queue for a long time (a few hours), then all of a sudden the queue will empty.

Thank you very much for all your patience so far.
 
One other thing...

In the list of queues, when the queue has sent all of its messages, what should the icon look like next to the queue name? Should it be a green circle with a tick in it?

Other than the local delivery queues, there are no green circles with ticks. The icons are either an open folder or a retry icon (blue circle with an arrow). Now and then I do see a green circle and tick, but not very often.

Thanks.
 
One possibility is DNS problems. Go to and run the tests there. If necessary, take any remedial actions reported. Your DNS server settings for the mail may not be reporting to your ISP correctly.

Are you experiencing high internet traffic for your network? This can also affect your mail services.

As I mentioned, it may be caused by a bad message that is holding up the queues and you need to delete it and restart the MSECHANGE services. Look for the oldest message in the queue or those that have a large size being sent to many recipients. From my experience, these are the ones that creates problems for my mail server.
 
We had this same problem until we removed all the DNS servers listed in Exchange. Now email flows great.

Hope this is helpful.

Larry
 
Thanks for the suggestion lhuegele.

I just checked and in Exchange there are no DNS servers set up. I assume it uses the system's DNS servers ie the ones set up through control panel.
 
As I said earlier, make sure the NIC on your Exchange server is set to only look at your internal DNS server, and not any external ones.

I'm Certifiable, not certified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.
 
Sorry lander215 I must have misunderstood a previous post. The NIC on the Exchange server should ONLY be pointing to an internal DNS server?

It currently has as its preferred DNS server our internal DNS and as its alternate one of the ISP's DNS servers.

Is this not correct. As I said I'm new here and haven't as yet worked out all of the network configurations. The DNS setup seems pretty mixed up - one of the DNS servers points back at itself!! - That can't be right!

Thanks for your patience with this.
 
Your DNS server should point to itself. All of your internal clients, including Exchange, should be pointing to your internal DNS servers only. Your DNS server should be configured with the forwarders pointing to your ISP's DNS servers.

You shouldn't have anything inside pointing to external DNS servers except the forwarders section of your DNS server config.

I'm Certifiable, not certified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.
 
Your DNS server should point to itself

In the event viewer of the DNS server it often has a warning that says:

The DNS server encountered a packet addressed to itself -- IP address x.x.x.x.
The DNS server should never be sending a packet to itself. This situation usually indicates a configuration error.


So I assumed that it was the DNS pointing to itself that does this?
 
Google the event id that you're getting.

I'm Certifiable, not certified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.
 
You could try creating an SMTP Connector and see if it solves your problem. Normally you don't require creating one and can just rely on the smpt virtual server, but since you are having this problem, it doesn't hurt to try. You can search microsoft website on how to create an smtp connector.
 
I have had a similar problem, just deleted, and re-recreated SMTP connector, all is well again!!
 
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