Exchange not sending external mail

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xpd

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#23794 9-Jul-2008 08:45

Any Exchange experts awake ? :)

Trying to send email via our Exchange server (which has been working fine for years), but now the external mail gets queued to go out, but dosent. Just sits there, message were seeing is "Remote connection dropped connection". If we force the emails, they go.

Ive Googled the issue and found people blame it on almost anything from DNS issues at the ISP to Symantec Mail Security causing it.

Weve checked with the ISP and via SMTP testing and found no fault at the ISP end, at our end weve disabled Symantec, restarted the Exchange services etc but still no go.

Any ideas what else we can check ?

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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bobmeister

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#145234 9-Jul-2008 08:50

Depending what version you are on, it could be an issue with your mailboxes being full.

Compacting them may help.

Also it could be an internal DNS issue. Restart the DNS service on your Domain Controller (assuming DNS runs on your DC).

freitasm

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#145242 9-Jul-2008 09:16

You can configure the SMTP connectors to use a Smarthost - your ISP's own SMTP server. Perhaps your email are not going out because the recipient is doing a DNS lookup and your server is not using the same name as your domain, or is not a static IP address...

xpd

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#145246 9-Jul-2008 09:23

Thanks guys, think we have found the issue, will give an update once weve confirmed :)

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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xpd

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#146004 10-Jul-2008 10:50

Appears our issue was spam.... we were getting hammered by it and the server was getting clogged up with postmaster replies etc. Seems to be all go again now :)

Thanks for the advice :)

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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tonyhughes

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#146018 10-Jul-2008 11:31

xpd: Appears our issue was spam.... we were getting hammered by it and the server was getting clogged up with postmaster replies etc. Seems to be all go again now :)

Thanks for the advice :)

Running Exchange 2003 here with Trend Micro CSM SMB on a Xeon 5140DC ML350 with a fs/128 DSL connection, and got hammered with 300,000 spam emails in a very short space of time.

Just changing our MX records to SMX.co.nz now... bring the spam on, and leave it in Auckland :-)

Simonm

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#147193 12-Jul-2008 17:49

Thats some serious spam!
We have a barracuda unit, it eats anything bad thrown at it with ease. Generaly get about 30-40k of emails a day (unit filters maybe 3-400 email addresses across a few dozen domains.