Hi!

For several reasons, I decided to fully restore my Exchange Server 2013 machine today.

The machine is virtualized on Hyper-V.

I rebooted the server and recovered from backup and Exchange seems to be working fine. However, I cannot receive or send mail. If I try to send a message it goes to the "drafts" folder. OWA and EMC is working. I can not send mail between interna mailboxes either. Outlook says disconnected.

When running the Exhchange Connectivity Analyzer, I get the following:
- Receive: Connection was successful but no banner was received.
- Send: Successfull. However when trying to send mail to external mailbox it does not reach that mailbox.

Mailflow was working perfectly at the time of the backup.

Help is much appreciated!

UPDATE 1: When telnet on local server i get SMTP banner. But not on other computers in same subnet.

• Edited by HansMarius 17 hours 12 minutes ago Topic respecified

A small update:

The reason for the recovery of the machine was after trying to upgrade/install Exchange 2013 CU2 on top of Exchange 2013 CU1 while KB2874216 was installed. The Upgrade failed and after that I could not remove that KB. Therefore I recovered the server.

I suspect the CU2 installer upgraded the schema in Active Directory, can this be the reason for me not beeing able to receive or send mail? The actual Exchange server would then be on CU1 level while Active Directory is currently CU2 level?

I tried to restore the server using this GUIDE, but that didnt work. It could not get past Transport Role installation and the logs showed something like could not start the Transport service. As of now the Exchange server is restored back to latest backup when server was functional. That means that KB2874216 is present.

Any advice please?

EDIT1:
- The current AD schema for Exchange is "15281" according to this GUIDE. And I verified this to be CU2 from this schema list.
- Exchange Server itself is Version 15.00.0620.034 which corresponds to CU1 according to this list.

Now what to do?

• Edited by HansMarius 17 hours 17 minutes ago Added relevant info