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elliotg
Old Timer
Australia
389 Posts
Status: offline |
 Posted - 10/21/2008 : 05:02:50 AM
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Can anyone cast any light on this strange occurence.
Had a complaint from a user that two emails to another user on the same server were delivered 13 days late. I did not believe this at first, but message tracking seemed to confirm it. Looked around for anything odd happening on the day they were sent.
Turns out that a large mailstore database was offline at the time the messages were sent. The mailstore for the sender was definitely on line, but the mailstore the recipient mailbox is located on was the one that was offline. So it certainly could not be delivered immediately. But why wait almost 2 weeks?
Anything special on the day of delayed delivery? Yes! It was the day we put the latest Microsoft updates on. In fact, it would seem that about the time of delivery the server in question would have been failed over (it is a clustered environment in which machines are failed over as part of the update process). So this would seem to be what finally triggered the delivery.
Very odd! Where were the message hiding for the 13 days? And why did it take a failover to tweak them out?
Elliot
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Elliot Gingold
University of Melbourne, Australia |
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clarinathan
Moderator
United Kingdom
4774 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 10/21/2008 : 05:56:53 AM
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That is rather strange!
I can only guess they got stuck in the queue and failing over caused an effective service restart which then reread the queues...? |
Nathan Winters - MVP Exchange Server
MCSE & MCSA 2000 & 2003 + Messaging, MCITP Exchange 2007, MCP, VMWare VCP v2 & v3.
Checkout the Messaging and Mobility User Group: http://www.mmmug.co.uk
Checkout my blog:
Unified Comms: - http://www.nathanwinters.co.uk |
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MadCow
Honorable But Hopeless Addict
Canada
1484 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 10/21/2008 : 07:12:41 AM
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With this one domain .... barclays.com I have mail sitting in the ques from OCT, 2 and they have not even expired .....strangeness.
Running Exchange 2003 with SP2. Never performed any updates. |
Sunny
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"Everyone is susceptible to the notion that when you begin to do well, you begin to see no boundary lines and forget the rules apply" - Eliot Spitzer
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Edited by - MadCow on 10/21/2008 07:13:53 AM |
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elliotg
Old Timer
Australia
389 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 10/21/2008 : 07:30:38 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by clarinathan
That is rather strange!
I can only guess they got stuck in the queue and failing over caused an effective service restart which then reread the queues...?
It is indeed strange. Unfortunately, the "sent" date is earlier than the expiry date for our message tracking. I found that the normal first line of such tracking logs when messages arise locally, the one that says "SMTP Store Driver: Message Submitted from Store", is missing for both of the delayed messages, so I am assuming this step occurred back at the start of this episode (i.e. more than 2 weeks ago). The first line we actually see in these 2 logs is "SMTP: Message submitted to Advanced queuing" which is dated at the end of the delay (that is, last Friday). So I am assuming that the messages went into limbo between these 2 stages. I am not really sure which queue they would be in at this stage.
My main interest is in whether this is likely to happen again and what to do if it does! |
Elliot Gingold
University of Melbourne, Australia |
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MadCow
Honorable But Hopeless Addict
Canada
1484 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 10/21/2008 : 08:13:07 AM
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After restarting my SMTP VS Isntance Resource from my Cluster Console are mails seemt to be working fine now .... or atleast the que looks better now.
Nathan your guess ..gave me the idea of restaring my SMTP VS Resource.
Why is this acting up, any ideas?
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Sunny
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"Everyone is susceptible to the notion that when you begin to do well, you begin to see no boundary lines and forget the rules apply" - Eliot Spitzer
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Strange happening - emails delayed for 13 days
