message resent multiple times with non-delivery report?

[dflanagan]

My Exchange 5.5 server has a VERY strange issue that happens to it:

Internet bound messages will sometimes get "stuck" in the outbound IMC queue. While they are "Stuck", they are actually being successfully sent! So, the recipeint recieves the message over and over again until the message times out of the queue. Fortunately, I have lowered the timeout to 1 hour which will result in the message being sent maybey 20-30 times to the same recipient until it gets kicked out of the queue. The sender then recieved the old undeliverable message...

There is no evidence why this happens.... it is random, and does not happen on particular sending or receiving accounts.... just randomly...

Any ideas??

 

[dmandell]

I've seen something similar caused by a poor, intermittent, network connection. Might be worth checking to make sure you are not seeing any network timeouts, or retries, or even a mismatch of the NIC duplicity settings.

If you have network switch or router logs that you can check, it's worth looking into.

If you don't have any of that available, try just simply pinging some server in the internet about a 100 times and see if you get 100% success. (or your local gateway for that matter) You never know what you might turn up.

It's one possible place to look.
If you don't see 99.9-100% success, there may be a problem.
Dana