Exchange 2007 over-quota mailbox DSN's.
Hi there I am investigating the management of Exchange 2007 generated NDR's for over-quota mailboxes. I notice that I receive a 5.2.2 NDR when I send to an overquota mailbox, which I know is a "permanent" failure notification. I also see that RFC3463 suggests that an overquota mailbox "should" (Not essential but advised) reply with a "permanent transient Failure", which means it should "retry". According to the link below Exchange assigns "permanent transient failures" with a 4.X.X NDR. So this implies that Microsoft have decided to treat overquota mailbox as permanent failures (Having assigned them with a 5.2.2). Does this sound like an accurate assessment? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124571%28EXCHG.80%29.aspx If so, I'm looking into whether this is configurable and whether a 4.2.2 message can be returned, does anyone have advice on this for me? Tom
August 31st, 2010 1:29pm

Microsoft made it a permenent error after Exchange 2000 SP2: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/284204/ Which actually makes sense because the administrator should be giving the user adequate warnings and setting the receive limit that is substantially higher than the send limit. I dont think that is configurable.
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August 31st, 2010 2:29pm

Cheers Andy. I understand the logic behind what MS have done, but I''ve got to determine now whether it is in fact possible to "retain" a copy of the actual email sent, which generated the 5.2.2 NDR in response. Following on from this, I've Managed to copy the "5.2.2 ndr "that is returned to a sender and have it put in a postmaster mailbox (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb400930%28EXCHG.80%29.aspx). However, what I really need is for the actual email to be stored somewhere (Only so that we can administer it via our own process). If it were a 4.2.2 error code delivered then our external gateway system would hold onto the email should it have originated from an external sender. For the internal senders the Hub transport servers would in theory "queue" the email. Does anyone have any further thoughts on this? I am inclined to check with MS also, but would like to get all my ducks in a row prior to that. Tom
August 31st, 2010 4:19pm

The NDR is set to return the orginal message, wmbeded within the NDR. On my system we have kept it at the default of 10MB. If an Email of larger than that is sent then the message is not embedded into the NDR . When you direct a copy of the NDR to a systrem mailbox, in my case I created postmaster, then you can either forward ALL related NDR's to a recipient, or use the "Send Again" option within the NDR. neither is "pretty", but it seems to be the only "out-of-the-box" option available with Exchange as they don't subscribe to the "permanant transient Failure" principle. It is a little clunky when the recipeint gets the forwarded NDR. they have to open it, then click Send Again, and then they will have access to the original email and any attachment. They dont actually have to send the email, but they have to go through that process. This is within Outlook. In OWA light they DO actually have to send the email to THEMSELVES in order to get the original message............. If you use an IMAP client like thunderbird however, it's a bit nicer. When you open the forwarded NDR, you will see the NDR as well as 3 attachments. One is another copy of the NDR, 1 is an eml file of the original message body, and another is any attachments that were sent with the original message. These are my observation anyway. Anyone have different experiences? Tom
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September 6th, 2010 6:01pm

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