stupid Exchange question

[Nose Nuggets]

not the best board to ask this on, but i know we have some IT folks in the house.


a few weeks back i had a clients exchange server go offline for about 40 minutes. during this time multiple external people sent mail to this server, none of those senders received an NDR or a delayed message notice, and none of those mail message where ever received when the server came back up.

i have had my hands in a verity of exchange servers over the years, and every time something like this has happened the mails that where sent were delayed on the sending server and retried later. the senders whos messages expired before delivery could take place received NDR notices.

now, i am pretty sure that the issues experienced are the fault of the sending server. but i wanted to see if anyone knew of some exchange setting that could cause delayed messages to not be received, or some setting on my exchange server that would force a sending server not to deliver an NDR to the senders mailbox.

[Khanan]

They should have received and NDR if the sending server sends NDRs.

I would be willing to bet that a SPAM filter was involved in making those messages go to dev null. The fight against SPAM has broken some of the rules of email.

[bigmike82]

Why was it offline?

If the exchange service had issue, it's conceivable that it still processed and accepted smtp but failed to store the actual emails.

[Ar_Glock_Man]

????

[Nose Nuggets]

it was offline because we had to move it (it was way after hours, and a planned maintenance).


Khanan i think you might be on to something, more and more people have dropped ndrs all together because of NDR spam attacks.

[ibanezfoo]

Its up to the sending server. If your server cannot be reached the sending server has various settings for retries. For instance, my old server would try 5 more time at 15 minute intervals, then try 3 times at hour long intervals, then try once a day for 3 days. If the message couldn't be delivered at those times it would toss it.