Hello, I have been researching a problem where some but not all of our email being sent to our compliance attorney is being rejected. This is a recent and a sporadic issue that began about five weeks ago. Our server is running Exchange 2003 SP2 Enterprise Edition and although I am not an Exchange guru myself I have made the effort to use the best practices analyzer and the tools available on DNSStuff.com to ensure our server is configured reasonably well. As currently configured it has been running over 18 months with virtually no issues. When our email is rejected by the attorney’s server we receive the following message: Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients. Subject: RE: Exams; Monthly Compliance; Reverse P & P Draft; HMDA; Sent: 2/1/2011 9:41 AM The following recipient(s) cannot be reached: recipient@xxxxxcompliancegroup.com on 2/1/2011 9:41 AM The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not report a specific reason. Check the address and try again. If it still fails, contact your system administrator. < ironport.fb.int #5.0.0 smtp; 5.3.0 - Other mail system problem 500-'Line limit exceeded' (delivery attempts: 0)> My logs show that every single email we send to the attorney’s server is delivered however, their server rejects some but not all of our messages. After several conversations with their network administrator it was revealed that their email server is actually the hosted platform offered by 1and1.com which appears to be utilizing Exchange 2007. It was further revealed that 1and1.com has decided to set a message body line limit of 80 lines and they told our attorney to request that we set our message body line limit to 80 lines so their server will not reject any of our messages. This is where I would like some feedback from any actual Exchange gurus. All my research leads me to believe the ability to set message body line limits first became available in Exchange 2007. Consequently, even if I wanted to adjust our message body line limits (and I am not convinced that I would) I am simply not able to within Exchange 2003. My research also indicates that Exchange 2003 has a default message body line limit of 500. If that is correct I would have to believe that Microsoft would have set the message body line limit default in Exchange 2007 to the same 500 lines in order to ensure message compatibility between the versions and that 1and1.com deviated from this default by a significant amount. What I was unable to determine during my research is how many characters Microsoft uses to define a line. I need to know this in order to calculate the average word count per line to determine just how small a line limit of 80 really is. I hope someone can confirm or clarify these facts for me. It would help me understand the differences between their Exchange 2007 and our Exchange 2003 systems as well as understand the true size of an 80 line message as defined by Microsoft. Also if anyone can provide any reason as to why you might want to reduce your message body line limit to 80 lines versus setting more traditional size limits for the message I would be grateful. No one I have spoken to about this issue could think of any reason to set such a small line limit on the message body. Sincerely, David

I have seen posts on the Internet about Ironport appliances doing this. If you want to help the other company fix their Ironport device so that they aren't bouncing mail, you could forward some of them to their administrator. If I were you, I'd wash my hands of the problem because it isn't yours.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Hello Ed, Thank you for responding to my questions. To clarify the Ironport appliance is our C160 model appliance which has been in service since October of 2009. This “line limit exceeded” bounce back issue began to happen in the mid fall of 2010. As far as I can tell our Ironport appliance has been running trouble free and we have been spam free since it went online. If you know of any issues related to the Ironport I would love to hear about them. I have spoken with their support team to review the Ironport log files and they show all our email does reach the 1and1.com server then it rejects for exceeding the line limit. One of the reasons I am interested in finding out how Microsoft defines a line within the email body is because this very attorney wrote a disclaimer for our email that we now insert onto all our outbound email. The disclaimer is a full two paragraphs which I suspect take up 17 to 20 of the available 80 lines. Add another 8 to 10 lines for our employee's signature including two carriage returns to add a space above the disclaimer and another 8 or 9 lines for the antivirus product confirming the email is virus free and we have used between 33 and 39 lines before we have even said “Hello”. This leaves only 45 or so lines to type the actual message. We are a mortgage bank so you can imagine if we need to send the attorney an email discussing the particulars of a mortgage the 45 remaining lines will get used up really fast. As I continue to look into this issue the correlation between adding the disclaimer and the appearance of the bounce backs becomes clearer. I think that without the disclaimer we more often than not fell below the limit and rarely saw any bounced messages. However, after adding the disclaimer to our email we are landing on the wrong side of the 1and1.com 80 line limit often enough that it is now affecting our productivity. Since I am going back and forth with an attorney and his network administrator I am trying to make sure my facts have been confirmed. That is why I am trying to confirm the actual line limit defaults, how Microsoft defines a line and if Exchange 2003 even has the ability to set a message body line limit. So far I do not know of a way to set this limit within Exchange 2003. I am also curious if the statement by 1and1.com that a “common recommendation for a line limit for the mail-body is 80 lines” is true or not. My research so far has not uncovered any reasons or explanations as to why you might want to reduce your message body line limit which is adding to my confusion as to why 1and1.com did. Thank you, David

Hi David, In my opinion, it is not a issue related with exchange, the line maybe also counted by the new line character in the message body, and the message body could be HTML or TEXT, the one linke could contains how many character, it maybe defined in the outlook client end. And I think the line limit is not a good behavior to filter the email, the formate of the email message body maybe affect it largely. If I misunderstand your issue, please tell me. Regards! Gavin Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.