Email Randomly Disappears in Exchange 2010
I have recently converted from a hosted email solution using SmarterMail to a self-hosted server using Exchange 2010. I have several employees who catch Exchange simply losing sent Email. For example, a user sends an email to fred@ourdomain.com (its internal to each other). The message shows up as sent, but the recipient, Fred, never gets the message. I had a user complain that email "stopped" (they get multiple emails an hour) and they tested their own email. In other words, john@ourdomain.com sends an email to john@ourdomain.com and the message is listed as sent, but never arrives.\ in their inbox and no rejection message shows up. I have tried using the Queue Viewer and, honestly, it seems like the most poorly designed hunk of junk I have ever used. Seriously, why is this not majorly upgraded? Besides the fact it is not designed to simply see all outgoing versus all ingoing email, or blocked/rejected email in a nice list, or to just see some recent history... seriously - besides the fact no end user could possibly be happy with it... When it shows me all the queues and I click on a column (like message count), all the number of queues displayed changes entirely (half of them vanish and all with one or less messages in their respect queue). If I click back on next hop domain they reappear. If I see the "last error" message, I cannot read the whole thing or copy it. If I double click the queue and open the messages, the error displayed does match the last error (all of us want to see the error message from the email server rejecting the message, I don;t want the translated categorical error that Exchange converted that error into. Okay, I don't really want to turn this into a complaint session about the queue viewer; although, I am more than hinting that whomever owns that aspect of Exchange absolutely sucks at their job - period - the viewer is HORRIBLE! Again, okay, beyond that... how do I troubleshoot what is causing email to randomly vanish? NOTE: A user can send to themselves successfully over and over, and then randomly *poof* it disappears. ALSO NOTE: I think there is something in common about them ALL being a reply or forward of email, not a new message. I read somewhere that Exchange had a flaw, in the past, where it duplicated message IDs and auto-disposed of the duplicate. I wonder if their is a variation of this still alive when forwarding or replying?? ASIDE NOTE TO EXCHANGE DEVELOPMENT TEAM: Please, redesign your product so that there is a single folder that retains a reasonable history (let's say 3 days and not more than XXX messages) of ALL EMAIL DISCARDED. I should not have to scour logs. I should have a toolbox item where I can simply browse the discarded email history and actually see ALL of it. Thanks in advance and I'm not sorry for my blunt feedback :) Enjoy
August 16th, 2012 4:59pm

I've had several cases recently where users complained about mail not being received. In all those cases it turned out that the user had created a rule in Outlook and had inadvertantly set it to delete incoming mail. The other possibility is that you might have spam filtering software intercepting the emails and removing them. If you temporarily want to capture a copy of all mail going through the server, have a look at setting up a journaling rule perhaps?
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August 16th, 2012 8:47pm

I believe your using the Queue viewer when what you might consider is message tracking. If a message is received and delivered by the server, you can track that better there. However if the messages are never reaching the server, then as stated above this may be a client issue.
August 17th, 2012 4:51pm

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