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Exchange won't deliver mail

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16 replies

by dlandrum1

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I am experienceing an issue where a single individual in my office can not seem to get email from a specific company. He receives all other email communications, just not from this company. I have been in touch with the IT contact at that company and I had him send ME an email from the contact that is trying to send to my user - - that mail did not come through either. However, when the IT contact sent me an email from the Administrator account it came through just fine. The Administrator account can also send to my end user. I turned on Message tracking to see if we could determine what the problem is as we have ruled out DNS issues, mail intercept/quarantine programs and incorrect addresses.

In the message tracking, for the messages that DO come through, there are 7 lines of data tracking, beginning with the message being submitted to Advanced Queue and ending with the message delivery. For the messages that DO NOT go through, there are only two lines in the message tracking log - Message submitted to advanced queueing and Started Message Submission to Advanced Queue.

Neither I not the IT contact on the other end have the foggiest notion why it would ONLY be the mail from any other than the Administrator account at this particular company.

Anyone had this bizarre experience before? Willing to share your fix?

Thanks!
Deb

16 replies

by dlandrum1

no takers on this one? any input would help - -
it would be better than no input....

Thanks.
Deb

by mysterio56

Do you have any kind of antivirus or spam filter that might be the filtering this person's address?

Also, I'd have the IT person at the other side check the client that the his user is sending from. It's possible that he/she has specific settings for formatting internet bound messages. For example, maybe they have a setting to use uuencode instead of mime...something like that.
Good luck.

by iainspirit

Need a bit more info on this, specifics on the software (servers & client) & config & ISP typebeing used.

But in the meanwhile, where does the email die? Does the sender get a NDR? Does the mail hit your servers?

I would guess that the mail is not leaving their company and they have some firewall protection / mail filtering that is preventing the message getting to you but the Admin account has access to get round the security and thats why only mail from that account is being recieved.
Hey you did say anything would be better than nothing!

Good luck,

Iain

by dlandrum1

The incoming mail is shown as leaving the servers on the sending end. Turning on message tracking on this end shows that it arrives, is scheduled into the delivery queue,and then there is nothing more shown ... just those two events in the message tracking log.

We are using Exchange 2000, the client s/w is Outlook 2K installed as the enterprise version, running on either a Win2K Professional workstaion or a Win98 workstation (I'm in the process of upgrading, so I have some of each).

The sender does NOT receive an NDR
We have a DNS hosting service, but don't go through a "typical" ISP for email as we do it inhouse with the Exchange server. Since the message shows as arrived and is just getting inexplicably dropped, I don't think ithas to do with the DNS Hosting service.

by j_vangulik

Look in the badmail queue for the messages.

Should be in c:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\Mailroot\vsi 1\BadMail

by bob pocius

Can you telnet a session from the other company to yours, and generate an email that way? (using telnet x.x.x.x 25).

by hakim

Hi Deb,

Just a quick question my understanding is that the IT of the other company from the Administrator box can send email to your user, did he try with other mail boxes like his for instance?, another thing, can he try instead of using the email software on his user side to use any kind of webmail and try to send you the same email,( just trying to avoid the local setup of the user may be he has something local on his outlook or Outlook express or whatever emailer software he is using).
Does the user on the other company received a non delivery email?
and also I will try to use webmail from a different machine with the same users credentials, just to eliminate all doubts about a certain system corruption on the user machine

keepus posted
Thx
Hakim

by teo

1. Make sure you don't have any filters set up for that domain, in system manager.

2. See if you can send email to your exchange server from that domain through the command line.

3. If you're using some kind of SPAM aware software, that domain may be blacklisted.

Hope this helps.

by golfloon

As the message arrives on your server you can rule out DNS problems and problems at the sending end. Some areas you may want to check:

Is the content of the message being blocked by a Mail Sweeping Agent.

Has the user put a delivery rule either client side or server side.

Check the delivery options and delivery restrictions in Exchange Admin on both the users account and on the Internet Mail connector.

If that doesn't work try:

http://www.msexchange.org
http://www.slipstick.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/default.asp

Hope this helps

Andy

by cmkajue

One part you have not informed us yet is whether the individual from your company can send mail to the other person at the other company. If your person can send mail to that other person, then indeed I have encountered a scenario similar to that.
With my guy at my company, he had inadvertently setup a rule in Outlook to discard messages from a specific individual who works for one of our vendors. This was a mistake on his part as he was only trying to get rid of spam messages from another e-mail account. It took me a whole week to discover that - just one of those things that you do not expect to happen.

So, go to Outlook and open his e-mail, check his rules and ensure that there is nothing in there specifying to discard messages from the other person.

Cheers mate!

Claude
London, England

by pmcpherson

I have experienced this problem before. it turned out to be the number of hops. By default exchange sets the nuber of hops at 15. With mail scanners, content filters etc etc at both ends plus route hops from ISP to ISP 15 is not that many. mail is arriving at your server with a hop count of 14 or 15 and dying in the MTA. Have the admin at the sending exchange server increase the number of hops to 20 or more and test. It worked for me.

by mdardis

I had a similar situation were the reverse dns was not setup with my ISP, who was hosting my dns records for me at the time. One company had it setup that reverse dns was a "must" in order to exchanges emails. good luck!

by na_paul

Although I think the previous hops setting may be the answer to this particular problem, I did have a similar problem that was fixed by adding a ptr record for the reverse dns. In that problem the sender did get a NDR.
There are a couple of web sites that are handy for troubleshooting these problems at www.DNSstuff.com & www.dnsreport.com

Paul

by j_vangulik

We had the exact same issue at a company I used to work for. I could send mail to a user at another company, but someone else in our company could not send to that same user.

It turned out that the other company had an attachment scanning/filtering type program in f their mail system. It was configured to drop messages that looked like they contained viruses and the rules were configured to exclude all messages that contained files with the extension .vcf. Turns out that Outlook uses thisfor signature files (ie your contact information). I did not have it configured in my Outlook, but the other user did. Turning off his signature did the trick.

by dlandrum1

As it turned out, the issue was with signatures, but not specifically related to the .vcf files. It also was related to my mail filtering product - Mail Essentials by GFI, but not related to one of my settings, rather related to an incompatibility with use of the Advanced Editing features that are available in Word 2K2.

Seems that this group of people had discovered after having a Service Pack installed, that they could use Word as the editor to create their "cutesy and fancy" sig files. The problem in email receipt on our end coincided very closely to this SP installation.

When we had them remove their signatures, the email came through loud & clear. When we had them create new sig files WITHOUT using the Advanced Edit features, the email continued to come through.

That was a difficult one, but we also had 2 Microsoft technicians working with us on it. They were able to down load the Mail Essentials and recreate the issue on their stuff.

We had one other that turned out that the sender was not using Outlook 2K, rather they were using Lotus Notes. There was only one guy at that firm that could not send to us, everyone else could. I started investigating his signature since it was the signature in the Microsoft products, and turns out his signature was 5 lines long. I had him remove his sig and send...it came through. I had him start adding one line at a time and send... 2 lines came through fine.....3 lines came through fine...4 lines failed.

So, without initiating an additional Microsoft incident, since this was Lotus notes not Outlook, he has modified his signature to be only 3 lines and we are flying again.

So, anyway, sorry to go on so long about this, but my theory is that the more people I tell about it, the sooner someone else who runs into it may be able to find the answer when they need a helping hand.

by trizzi

check your event logs to see if your rejecting the mail or if there is a conversion problem with the format of the mail. Check errors and warnings from the IMC first., then messages from the MTA..
if the email is getting to your server and either being rejected or if there is a problem with it being processed to the STore, there will be an event in the application log

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