John Orban
10-06-2002, 08:21 PM
I have posted this question before and since no one responded I am going to try to be a bit better in describing the problem and what I have tried to do to resolve it before posting.
For about six months or more now, people emailing via SMTP are getting a NDR that the user account does not exist when, in fact, there is a valid user account.
I happened to be on the telephone with my ISP trying to troubleshoot what I thought was a dearth of email messages during the course of the day. As it turned out, there were a number of emails backing up in his queue trying to be sent to our server.
The way this works, as it most likely works with others, it that our ISP merely acts as a forwarder of all of our email. He doesn't hold it, but returns an NDR if the mail can not be expeditiously delivered.
This day, he tried sending mail via telnet and regular mail and could see the socket open between the servers yet the transaction, after about 10-30 seconds timed out and the error message about a non-existent account popped up again.
We have thought that this might have been due to the server being so busy that it just couldn't respond to the email request. In fact, I used to run our network backup on that machine but have subsequently moved backup to another server (and eventually to an Internet company) so that the total amount of backup time is about 10 minutes while the server backs up to a file on another server.
There is nothing else running on this machine other than Exchange 5.5 - SP4. I have SP3 on W2K and all the latest hotfixes and security updates applied to the box.
What I need help with is HOW to troubleshoot this problem. This is not an internal problem because internal email is delivered. So I don't think I can use server monitors. I need a way to track what is happening when mail is sent from outside the school to our server. Of course, I can send mail from my hotmail or other personal email accounts and I have tried that with SMTP logging enabled but it shows nothing in the logs so I either do not have the right kind of logging enabled or this is an issue that can't be resolved by logging?
The fact that the ISP said the socket was connecting, but nothing was happening after that should be a clue. I have tried looking through my Exchange documentation but I can't find enough information about the process of delivering the mail to figure out what I should be looking for.
I am in the process of scanning the Swink CD to see if this issue has come up before, but it's taking a bit of time to do that and so far I haven't found anything (except my prior unanswered posts) to help.
As I mentioned before, I need some troubleshooting advice on where to start and what I should be looking for.
Thanks in advance,
John Orban
System Administrator
The Country School
For about six months or more now, people emailing via SMTP are getting a NDR that the user account does not exist when, in fact, there is a valid user account.
I happened to be on the telephone with my ISP trying to troubleshoot what I thought was a dearth of email messages during the course of the day. As it turned out, there were a number of emails backing up in his queue trying to be sent to our server.
The way this works, as it most likely works with others, it that our ISP merely acts as a forwarder of all of our email. He doesn't hold it, but returns an NDR if the mail can not be expeditiously delivered.
This day, he tried sending mail via telnet and regular mail and could see the socket open between the servers yet the transaction, after about 10-30 seconds timed out and the error message about a non-existent account popped up again.
We have thought that this might have been due to the server being so busy that it just couldn't respond to the email request. In fact, I used to run our network backup on that machine but have subsequently moved backup to another server (and eventually to an Internet company) so that the total amount of backup time is about 10 minutes while the server backs up to a file on another server.
There is nothing else running on this machine other than Exchange 5.5 - SP4. I have SP3 on W2K and all the latest hotfixes and security updates applied to the box.
What I need help with is HOW to troubleshoot this problem. This is not an internal problem because internal email is delivered. So I don't think I can use server monitors. I need a way to track what is happening when mail is sent from outside the school to our server. Of course, I can send mail from my hotmail or other personal email accounts and I have tried that with SMTP logging enabled but it shows nothing in the logs so I either do not have the right kind of logging enabled or this is an issue that can't be resolved by logging?
The fact that the ISP said the socket was connecting, but nothing was happening after that should be a clue. I have tried looking through my Exchange documentation but I can't find enough information about the process of delivering the mail to figure out what I should be looking for.
I am in the process of scanning the Swink CD to see if this issue has come up before, but it's taking a bit of time to do that and so far I haven't found anything (except my prior unanswered posts) to help.
As I mentioned before, I need some troubleshooting advice on where to start and what I should be looking for.
Thanks in advance,
John Orban
System Administrator
The Country School