When our Exchange 2003 is restarted by Windows Autoupdate, which happens once in a month or two, we get a lot of delayed notifications about undeliverables and responses from recipients that they just received some old messages from us. These are undeliverables and messages that were supposed to be sent out weeks or month ago.Other than this, there is no indication of any problems on Exchange server.Has anyone ever experienced this?Any ideas what can cause this issue?Thank you.

First, you shouldn't have AutoUpdate auto-restart or patch your Exchange server. Let it download the updates and notify you, but occasionally there's an update you don't want auto-installed on the first day after release. And the auto-restart isn't all that elegant either.Exchange 2003 transport did have this problem for a while. In some cases the messages /were/ sent out weeks ago, but not cleared from the transport queue. Are you completely up to date on patches and service packs?File based anti-virus can cause this too on Ex2003 servers because it locks the files open as Exchange is trying to move them around, so make sure that all the Exchange directories are excluded from file based AV scanning.

Thank you for response, Andy.We are running WSUS, only critical and security updates are autoapproved and we have not had a problem with that so far. Other updates, like service packs, are installed on demand manually, and Service Pack 2 is applied to Exchange.The scenario you described is different. In our case it appears that the messages in question are not sent out until the server is rebooted. For example, the notification about some month old undeliverable e-mails are generated after reboot, although the delay notifications is set to 12 hours and expiration time-out to 2 days.We run the antivirus on demand only, it is normally disabled, and Exchange database folders are excluded. We scan incoming messages on another appliance before they reach Exchange server.I will doube check the antivirus settings, but I am positive, it is disabled.This is still a mystery to me. I guess we have to keep restarting Exchange server every week, until we find out what causes the issue.

When you check the AV, it isn't just the Exchange database folders, but also the SMTP queue folders, which are in another location.It would be interesting to check the message tracking logs and also the SMTP protocol logs for those messages to see what, if any, attempts were made to deliver them when first sent.

Thank you for response, Andy.I confirmed that AV is disabled.From what I see in message tracking logs for one of the messages in question it seems like the message was transferred at the time it was sent, and then again month later, but in the "Message transferred to <mail server> through SMTP" line the mail server name is missing for the original transfer, while for the second attempt after Exhcnage reboot month later it shows the correct mail server name for the recipient in "Message transferred to..." line.For another message, that Exchange was supposed to generate NDR a month ago, it shows that it was transferred to the correct mail server, then month later after reboot it tries to transfer the same message again for some reason and generates NDR for it. This one was addressed to two recipients, and has two "Message transferred to..." lines, one of them has word "postini" instead of the mail server name. Which does not seem to be right.These look more like DNS issues to me, but I do not understand why 12 hour delay notification and 2 days expiration time-out are not triggered, and only reboot fixes the issue?

Exchange 2003 had some bugs that caused messages to get stuck like this. In most cases the messages were delivered, but the smtp session didn't close correctly and so the message ended up stuck in the queue, whereby it would get reprocessed on restart. So, as you've seen, it looks like what you're seeing is duplicate delivery rather than failed delivery.

Thank you for response, Andy.You have already mentioned about that. Although I am not sure it is the case, but if you could point to the KB article that has the bug fix, I would make sure it is patched.

It looks like KB950757 is describing exactly what we are experiencing. I will try that hotfix.

On Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:43:58 +0000, digimonx wrote:>When our Exchange 2003 is restarted by Windows Autoupdate, which happens once in a month or two, we get a lot of delayed notifications about undeliverables and responses from recipients that they just received some old messages from us. These are undeliverables and messages that were supposed to be sent out weeks or month ago.Other than this, there is no indication of any problems on Exchange server.Has anyone ever experienced this?Any ideas what can cause this issue?Thank you. This usually fixes the problem with those "stuck" messages:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950757/en-us---Rich MatheisenMCSE+I, Exchange MVP--- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

Hi All Thank you for your replies. Your expertise never fails to impress Thanks, Richard.

i try to download the hotfix but receive an messagge : the system is not available... can upload the hotfix on megaupload please ? thanksoasis in my heart

Just a bump to see if digimonx can report back whether that hotfix actually resolved his issue. I just experienced the same thing after a post-patch-Tuesday manual reboot. BJ

Yes, it did resolve the issue. That is why that post is marked as the answer.