Exchange 2000 sporadically sending/receiving emails

[LSBarron]

Hello,

I'm having a nightmare here with Exchange 2000 server whereby I am only receving emails sporadically. It looks like there is a delay in receiving emails of about 1 hour and 10 minutes.
The first problem I encountered was that the IS had reached its max of 16gig so I did an offline defrag. This reduced the size of priv1.edb etc but the problem remained...
Any help anyone could give here would be brilliant!!

PS - I might be wrong here but it looks like when I restart the Exchange Server, it seems to flush some emails through so that after a restart a few emails will come through...

 

[fs483]

Do you have a anti-virus or anti-spam software running for Exchange ? What about an anti-virus software for files ? Check the CPU Usage. Any services hogging up your CPU ? Look in your queues, maybe you have a very large number of emails trying to go out of your exchange but it's failing (open relay). Maybe you are receiving a lot of spam and your system is busy sorting it out or sending NDRs. I had a customer that was receiving thousands of spam from one specific IP. I ended up blocking this IP and solved the problem. Check the SMTP connexions to your server, maybe you have a mail server that's feeding you a lot of junk.

 

[LSBarron]

Hey!
Cheers for the response. Its a wierd kind of setup here actually. The mail travels from the users machine to a server running GFI (Anti-Spam software) and then to the Exchange and then to the world (and vice versa).
How do I check if a service is hogging the processor? Ctrl-Alt-Del? How do I look at my queues?

 

[fs483]

First try to disable GFI and see if the problem disappears. If yes, then go to GFi's website and check their FAQ, maybe they have updates. Worst case, uninstall and reinstall. Good to do a reboot after uninstall but I know it's hard in a production environment.

 

[LSBarron]

Hey akwong,

I stopped the GFI services and nothing changed. ....it seems as though when I restart the exchange machine or the GFI machine i get the emails that have been logged up...
What the hell could it be!?

 

[fs483]

After you stopped GFI, did you restart the smtp service ? Then try to send some mail to and from yourself to an external account (yahoo or something). See if it's instant. Also after stopping GFI, wait a good 10 minutes. Sometimes there's some back log that the server has to deal with. As for your queues, check in the ESM (Exchange System Manager, expand Servers, Your Exchange Server name, Protocols, SMTP, Default SMTP, and finally Queues, check to see the status to different domains if it's on retry or something.

 

[ymeq123]

Have you checked GFI's manuals to verify that the exchange server and the GFI gateway (and the paths between the two) are setup correctly? (Maybe there is some sort of loop between the two.)