Another Exchange Question

[Unleashed]

Heeeeey everyone.

Just got a new HP Proliant server at work, we've migrated users etc etc to it no problem. Now, I'm falling over with Exchange being very selective with emails it's sending!
Basically, I was very much left in the lurch by the previous IT admin, who has left me no records of anything at all. He also had the old email system running pop3 boxes via MDaemon.
I have no prior experience with Exchange, so you'll have to bear with me if I ask stupid questions.

So, the problem:

Everyone can send emails to a few sources only. I can send them to my mother's work, I can send them to my home address, but I can't send them to my hotmail.
The majority of emails not getting through are those with attachments.
Unfortunately every email NOT getting through is work related, which obviously isn't helping at all.

So, does anyone have any ideas at all why this might be? Pressing send seems fine, the item moves from the Outbox to Sent Items, and no error message is ever returned. But, phoning the people we're sending them to shows that they just aren't receiving them!

SBS2003, Exchange 03.

I'm being torn to shreds by the drawing office manager, and desperately need something to go by!

Thank you!

Conrad

 

[Unleashed]

Aha! The plot thickens.

Having sent various test emails out yesterday at around 4pm, sometime around 4am this morning we started getting:

Delivery Status Notification (Delay)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipients has been delayed.

*Address here*

With this in a .txt attachment:

Reporting-MTA: dns;hubbsrv.*ourdomain*.local

Final-Recipient: rfc822;*email address*
Action: delayed
Status: 4.4.7
Will-Retry-Until: Sat, 17 Nov 2007 15:42:28 +0000
X-Display-Name: 'display name of contact'

Now, why is it waiting 12 hours or so before kicking up a fuss? After that the emails sent and we got replies saying they had received them!

 

[jpom]

Well the reason that your delayed message could have taken so long could be the "delay Notification Time". I know that on our exchange server, using a virtual smtp server, if you go into system manager, Admins groups, and keep following the tree down you will see "Virtual SMTP server" (ex. Default Virtual SMTP Server). Right click it and click the Delivery Tab, in this window you should see an area marked outbound and local. We changed the Delay Notification under outbound to 2 hours instead of the 12 it was at (default I believe) because we found that 12 hours before being notifed that the message did not go through was too long. Essentially Exchange keeps that message for 12 hours and keeps trying to send it before notifing the sender, this way it only takes 2 hours before a notification is sent to the sender. You can also adjust how long exchange will try to send the message before giving up and how often it trys here.

As for why the emails are delayed, i'm not sure off hand but if you go back up the directory tree in System Manager you should see a "Queues" branch and I've often found helpful information in there, so you can try that.

Now I'm not an Exchange Guru and have never really worked on another system other then the one we have here, so you should probably take all this with a fairly large grain of salt.

James

 

[Unleashed]

Thanks James - we eventually tracked the problem to being a user on the network using torrents which completely buggered up our connection to the outside world.