Exchange on SBS2008 having internal SMTP issues
So, here's the issue. I'm setting up a Windows 2008 Small Business Server. The SBS server needs to use a POP3 Connector on some of the email addresses so it can pass them on to the Exchange mailboxes, but this isn't working. Somewhere along the line the mails just vanish without a trace. I've checked the POP3 Connector and it's definitely downloading the messages. The logs show that it's having no issues and is passing things over to the internal SMTP server to be distributed. I've double-checked this by installing a third-party POP3 Connector and the results are the same as with the one that comes with SBS. The next step, from what I can determine, is the Content Filter. This is where things get a bit iffy, I think. The CF/Anti-spam was marking a lot of mail as bad and not passing it on, so I tried disabling it at first and the results are still the same, nothing comes through except in a few specific cases. In the end, I re-enabled it but told it only to scan and not take any action. This, at least, has shown me that the mails are going through the CF and on to wherever it's supposed to go next. The logs for the CF seem to be fine, it's scanning but not deleting and the reporting device in the SBS console properly increments when an email is sent. After that, in theory, it's passed to the internal SMTP where, even though I have the logs set to verbose on sending and each recieving section, I'm getting no logs generated by emails coming in. The send logs from an internal Exchange box out to the rest of the world are triggering properly, though. The oddest part of this all is that in some cases I -can- get emails through to the Exchange boxes. So far I've determined that if I reply to a message sent out (in this case to a test gmail account) the is delivered to the Exchange account just fine. Also, if I send the email to two people it goes through as well. So far I've only tried one internal/one external email in that scenario, though. Anyone have any thoughts? -Brett
March 30th, 2009 6:33pm

Whats the Action of the Content Filtering before? Please check the SCL rate in there, and compare it with the SCL value in Internet Header of those inbound mails from POP3 connector <Right-click mails, select Message Options> Have you checked Failed Mail folder in the %systemroot%\Program Files\Microsoft Small Business Server\Networking\POP3? Exchange will send corrupt mails to there About the SMTP logging, please check this article For questions about SBS 2008 please use the SBS 2008 which would be the most relevant place for the question Resources: How to enable Verbose logging in the Windows SBS 2008 POP3 Connector
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April 1st, 2009 8:58am

I'm pretty sure I've ruled out the Content Filtering. Everything is disabled except for scanning the messages, but I've told it to do nothing with ones that are past the SCL so in theory it's observing, but passing all email. I can't find this "Failed Mail" folder you are talking about. There is a "Bad Email" folder for the CF filter, but I don't have a directory that is similar to the one you mention. I have both SMTP logging and POP3 logging on verbose already, I've read those articles (and I've mentioned that in my initial post). Unfortunately, I'm not getting anything useful from any of those logs about what's going on with the email. There aren't any glaring errors that pop out. This whole thing would be easier if it rejected emails all the time, but as I've said some emails are coming through for an odd reason. I'm sure if I could figure out why some are making it through I could probably figure out what's going on, but this is my first time working with Exchange. I didn't post this in the SBS2008 forums because I'm pretty sure it has to do with the Exchange setup rather than the SBS2008 setup. Thanks for replying, though.
April 7th, 2009 5:01am

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