Specific Exchange 2003 Calendar Emails Always Hit in Retry Queue
This is a problem that has dogged me since May on two different Exchange deployments that I did not set up. It is a complicated problem, and I will form my description carefully to help.Parameters:1) Exchange 2003, SP2 being accessed by Outlook 2007 Clients2) Only Calendar emails are delayed then timed out, regular mail flows normally3) Problem only happens with Calendar email recipients who have an AD account AND an external email address in the mix; (either through an Exchange External Contact or by hand-addressing the appointment with the external address)4) The AD account does not need to be mail-enabled for the problem to exist.Longhand the behavior amounts to Calendar emails (appointment sets, updates, & deletes) to certain recipients only end up in the Exchange outbound Retry queues until they time out. We have isolated this to only those messages that have recipients who have both an AD account *and* traffic to an external mail address either through a forward from an AD account to an Exchange External Contact object or by having the appointment addressed directly to the external email account of someone with an AD account. The problem to be solved: We need to have logins for external collaborators to access SharePoint and Exchange mailboxes. We often need to forward Exchange mailbox traffic to their outside email addresses (hence the external contact items). I'd be happy to solve the root issue, but if we can find another way to accomplish having AD access and Calendar emails that go to offsite email addresses, that would be almost as good.The issue seems to be tied somehow to First Name / Last Name within Exchange. I say that because even a non-email enabled AD account can trigger the problem by virtue of addressing the Calendar appointment to someone with the same name as the AD account. Best I can figure it is something borked up in the original deploy/config (both done by same contractor) as none of our other Exchange 2003 servers have this issue despite using many External Contacts for this purpose.Thank you for your time and attention.
August 19th, 2008 7:57pm

Hi, I am a little confused. According to my understanding, appointment cannot send to recipients have both AD account and external email address, is that right? Then please open Queues under mailbox server and try to find out which queue does the appointment stick in, please find the additional queue information from the button of the window including the queue name and then post here. Besides, please use message tracking Center to track the appointment and post the detail information here for further troubleshoot. If it is not the case, then please feel free to let me know. Message tracking event IDs in Exchange Server 2003 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821905 How to use Queue Viewer to troubleshoot mail flow issues in Exchange Server 2003 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823489 Hope it helps. Xiu
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August 21st, 2008 1:32pm

Thank you for your response, Xiu. Your understanding of the problem is correct: "appointment cannot send to recipients have both AD account and external email address" The name of each delay queue created is the outside domain of the external email recipient. Examples: outsidedomain01.com, outsidedomain02.com All of these queues show this for the Additional queue information: Unable to open the message for delivery. Your help is appreciated!
August 21st, 2008 8:55pm

Hi, First please follow the below steps to find where did the message stick. 1. Please open Exchange System Manager, expand "Administrative Group"-"First Administrative Group"-"Servers"-"[Servername]"-"Queues". 2. In the right result pane, you will see many queues there. We need to find which queue did the appointment message stuck in. we have to go through step 3 on each queue. 3. Hit Queue name there, then click on "Find Message". In the "Find Message" Window, please specify the sender and select "Retry" from the drop list of "Show Messagewhose state is" and then "Find now" 4. If you find the message in the certain queue, then please right click on the queue name and select Force connection to see whether the message will be delivered. 5. When you find the appointment message which cannot be send, please remember the queue name. And then find the additional queue information from the button of the window. Then please check event log, whether event 327 has been generated there, if yes, then please follow kb938650 to correct the issue. A meeting update message or a meeting cancellation message from an Exchange 2003 user is not delivered to an Exchange 2007 user http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938650/en-us If not, then please try to find the error event from the event log and post here for further troubleshoot.(You may run Eventvwr from a command prompt to open Event Viewer) Also please check whether you have Anti-Virus application installed on the Exchange Server, if yes, then please try to disable it and check the issue. More related Kb articles share with you: E-mail messages become stuck in the "Awaiting directory lookup" queue in an Exchange Server 2003 organization http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922256/en-us Information quotes from the article: E-mail messages become stuck in the "Awaiting directory lookup" queue. The SMTP service stops responding when you try to stop the service. You can successfully stop the service only when you use Kill.exe or when you change the startup type to "manual" and then restart the server. The following events may be logged in the System log if diagnostic logging is enabled on the server that is running Exchange Server 2003: Event Type: Warning Event Source: MSExchangeTransport Event Category: Connection Manager Event ID: 4006 Message delivery to the host'(IP)failed while delivering to the remote domain (GUID)for the following reason: Unable to open the message for delivery. Event Type: Warning Event Source: MSExchangeTransport Event Category: Categorizer Event ID: 6006 Categorizer is temporarily unable to process a message. The function 'CSearchRequestBlock::LDAPCompletion' called 'async' which returned error code '0x800705b4' Hope it helps. Xiu
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August 22nd, 2008 6:29am

My organization appears to be having the exact issue discribed in KB938650. Meeting requests from our Exchange 2003 server users to external Exchange 2007 recipients are received. And the recipients acceptance of the meeting are returned back. But if the meeting requestor were to modify or delete the meeting request the outbound notification to the Exchange 2007 recipient sits in the SMTP Connector queue in a retry state till it times out and delivers a NDR to the meeting requstor. I've followed the instructions in KB938650. Installed the hotfix and made the addition to the registry, but that does not appear to have resolved the issue. Any assistance you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
September 18th, 2008 8:50pm

We have been fighting with this exact problem at one of our clients for a while now. First reported it was about 8 months ago. I installed and followed the hotfix 938650 instructions and all is well. Thanks.
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November 13th, 2008 3:26am

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