Unable to send outside e-mail

[vbothe]

Windows 2000 Server SP4, Exchange 2000 SP3

can send and receive e-mail internally
can receive external e-mail
unable to send external e-mail

recently ran eseutil and defrag and SP3 on Exchange. Seems like a few days later began having problems.
No open relays - can telnet to mail server, can telnet to an outside mail server.

Uninstalled and re-installed SP3. No blocking by ISP.

Any other ideas?

Thanks

V

 

[kmcferrin]

DNS? When you telnet to an external mail server (presumably on port 23), are you using the domain name or IP address of the remote host?

 

[vbothe]

Actually port 25 - however, it appears that something was blocking the queues. We went in and started deleting e-mails that appeared to be from postmaster at our domain and forced out all other e-mails. At some point in time we muset have deleted an e-mail or forced something out that was blocking the sending of the e-mails outside the domain. Now all is working. However, I still have e-mails beginning to stack up in the queues as being from postmaster at our domain. Possibly NDR's but NDR's are turned off. I am still working on it and just daily deleting those e-mails to keep the queue open. When I check some of the domain names they are fake or hijacker web pages. These e-mails are stuck in the queue under re-try - even a force connection does not send them. I am manually deleting them but don't want to do that daily. I am open to suggestions.

Thanks for your response.

V

 

[vbothe]

Finally opened a Microsoft ticket. They e-mailed a tool to re-install the SMTP service. Apparently an e-mail had corrupted both the mailroot and the smtp service (at least that is Microsoft's best guess). We are continuing to monitor for 24 -36 hours to ensure the smtp service continues to work normally. So far so good.