Exchange 2010 mailflow troubleshooting guide
I recently had a couple of cases where E-Mails were not being processed from the queues anymore causing mailflow issues and new e-mails were building up in the submission queue.
As a result of those cases I have created a guide for troubleshooting such issues and have documented the main steps:
- First of all we check the queue, open it and check the last error in the messages.
- If this is empty then it means that something is preventing messages from being delivered (either a stopped service, or a transport agent)
- The first thing we should do is to increase the logging level for msexchangetransport in the EMS with the help of the command: Get-EventLogLevel MsExchangeTransport |Set-EventLoglevel -Level High.
HOWTO increase the Logging Levels in Exchange 2003,2007 and 2010
- restart the transport service. Check if the issue still persists or if the e-mails are being delivered.
- Should the issue persists you can start excluding different transport agent. Run get-transportagent to see what agents you have installed and afterwards start deactivating them one by one*
*by default we have the following transport agents running on the exchange Transport Server in Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010
- With disable-transportagent we disable each agent. After disabling them we need to restart the transport Service.
Should this not help, we can also deactivate the antivirus software running on the HUB Servers.
- In some conditions, it is also necessary to uninstall many of the Antivirus Programs, because for example they are installing a Kernel-Mode Driver in the system.
- If the results are again negative we can create a new queue. For this we stop the transport service and move the queue folder completely from the default location to another location
- When we restart the transport service another queue will be created and normally the mailflow should be restored.
- What to do with the old queue if it contains to many mails/ in order to prevent data loss we can run eseutil/ mh against the old queue. If the queue is in clean shutdown we can procede with eseutil /d and eseuti /r against the queue file
- We can then stop the transport service again, move the queue back to the original location, rename the new queue folder in queue new and restart the transport service -> the mails should start being processed and delivered
- Worst case scenario the e-mails are not delivered. They remain in the queue. This means the old queue is beyond repair. In such a situation we can try to export as many messages as possible from the old queue and replay them in the new queue.
For this we should implement the following procedure:
Go to the queue in the Exchange Management Console and right click the queue and select suspend
- We need to suspend the messages from the queue also> we run get-message –filter {FromAddress –like “*@contoso.com”} | Suspend-Message
- We then have to run the command Get-Message –Queue “Server\Queue name” | Export-Message –Path “c:\contoso” to export the suspended Messages
- After the messages are exported then we need again to stop the transport service, move the queue from where we have exported the messages to another location, rename the folder queue_new to queue and restart the transport service.
- After the transport service is up and running we can copy the exported messages to the Replay folder under
Messages will now be delivered.
Hope the information provided was helpful for you and clarifies the process of mailflow troubleshooting.
If you have any questions, please send me an Email to ccorp@microsoft.com
Comments
- Anonymous
January 16, 2014
Great documentation!!! It was really helpful to me today!!! Thanks. - Anonymous
February 07, 2014
I ran into this issue at the end of last year and have to go thru exactly these steps listed in this documents. Thank you for posting this document! - Anonymous
May 01, 2014
Nicely explained - Anonymous
September 15, 2014
Nice Document.. thanks - Anonymous
October 20, 2014
Really a good document. Thanks for posting this - Anonymous
November 29, 2014
Nice step by step Explanation - Anonymous
December 03, 2014
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 05, 2015
I just browsed for knowledge purpose and this document is great help - Anonymous
July 28, 2015
Good work!! :) - Anonymous
August 01, 2015
Awesome docs. covered most of the scenario for mail flow issue.