i am very new at this admin business. i have never done it before and i'm all alone at a small struggling cd distribution company. we are still running windows server 2000 with exchange (not sure exactly what version). i was informed this morning that the e-mail wasn't working. after running some tests i have come to the conclusion that internal sending and receiving of mail works fine. also, we can send e-mail out of the office, i tested it with my gmail account. however, we cannot receive e-mail. the amount of spam has decreased! as well as all our clients communication. i'm sorry i don't have a lot more information - i do know that there has been e-mail problems in the past, however the last guy left no documentation. also, i was informed at one point that the MDBDATA folder ( with 2,693 objects measuring 15.8 gigs ) may eventually result in problems. veritas is backing up the files and resetting the archive bit however i thought echange is supposed to keep that folder pretty small. any ideas or suggestions would be grand! thank you! --------------- some additional information: all MS EXCHANGE and SMTP services are running like they should there are no event problems that looks like it has to do with exchange. we have a hand full of red flags that appear on boot up, timeouts, waiting for transactions, etc. from various services (i think i need to put on newer server software) rumor is its had problems ever since a re-build after a virus i found a smtp queue with a handfull of entries 4 or 5 have a connetion status of ready there are about 10 or so that are from various internet domains that have a connection status of retry totalling about 24 messages according to the log. a gal in the office said she was able to receive a message here and there but very few in respect to usual volume. could it be that the few we are receiving are pop3 and its the smtp and http messages (most typical) that aren't making it through? i telnet in and was able to send an e-mail "from" a gmail account to my pop3 domain account without any problem hope this all helps thank you again

Do you know how you receive mail? POP3 or through MX Records? if you use MX Records i would check nothing has changed with them you can check there pointing at the right place using dnsstuff. What sort of server setup is it? SBS2000? have you checked any firewalls there maybe? ISA or any routers that have firewall built in? If your using POP3 i would get rid of it and change your MX Records to point straight to your server cuts out any companys hosting your POP3 for you. hope it helps, Dave.