I have two Exchange 2007 servers running on Server 2008. One is CAS and Hub Transport, the other is the mailbox server. Majority of clients are using Windows XP SP2 and Outlook 2003. I installed SP3 for Exchange and the update rollup for SP3 on both servers Sunday - Monday morning I had a couple of people say they had problems opening some messages. By Tuesday it was apparent I had some sort of problem that was randomly affecting email. It's now Thursday and I have done all I can think of to narrow this problem down and I still have no real clue as to what it is or how to repair it. As far as I know, this is only happening with internal messages. I haven't heard anyone say their emails were unreadable to anyone outside of the company. Here's an overview: User A composes a new message in Outlook and sends it. User B receives the message but it shows up as blank in Outlook preview. If they try to open it a message pops up "Cannot open this item". If they try to reply or forward it they get this: "Could not complete the operation. One or more parameter values are not valid". The email is viewable in OWA and on a Smartphone. If you forward or reply to the message in OWA, the resulting message is still not viewable in Outlook. I had one user that had sent me 3 emails that I couldn't read followed by one later that I could, followed by 4 more that wouldn't open. Since that system was pretty consistent on sending bad emails I logged on to check it out. I was able to send myself messages with no problems, so I logged myself out and logged in as the user - every email I sent to myself came through fine again. I'm getting no errors other than the pop-up dialogs and the equivalent notification of the pop-up in event viewer. I don't see anything unusual on either Exchange server. The faulty messages are not readable in any version of Outlook from 2003 to 2010. Due to the timing of this event, I would bet the farm that it has something to do with the updates on Exchange, but it gives all indication of something quirky at the desktop level. Due to the lack of any meaningful error messages and the difficulty in consistently reproducing the problem I am having an incredibly difficult time figuring this out. If anyone has any ideas of where to look please let me know. My next step is putting on the headset and settling in for a long weekend with MS tech support. Thanks!

Have you tryed running the database repair tools, do they show you anny error message during scanning , and is the items that has been send valid in the send mail box can you open in there cos this should point to the same database item by the pointers. and can you also test sending the mails to a non exchange system on the CC. What does the message tracking logg give you for information , or manualy open the transaction loggs do they contain the data or are they blank to.

There are no errors on the database and the messages are not able to be opened from either the sent or deleted items folder, even on the system that created them. All the messages are fine as far as tracking or any other check in Exchange. The server doesn't see any issues with them at all, just Outlook. It also appears as though the frequency of the "bad" messages is increasing. I've gotten reports on about a dozen today.

For me this sounds like a bug, but i can be wrong The best suggestion is to give PSS a callJonas Andersson MCTS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010 | MCITP: EMA 2007/2010 | MCSE/MCSA Blog: http://www.testlabs.se/blog

This issue has been solved! I had to spend a week with MS Exchange support and numerous escalations to different people but we finally figured out the problem. We had installed a software package called QS Disclaimer over a year ago on the CAS server. We only used it for a few months to advertise an upcoming event via a "disclaimer" attached to outgoing messages. After the event, I disabled it through it's own console. Our disclaimer included a link to a web site so I had checked a box to have the software change the HTML link in case the message was plain text. See where this is going yet? Even though the software was turned off and disabled it apparently kept it's hook into the Exchange transport and was still examining outgoing messages, in spite of there being no disclaimer to add. This was not a problem until I installed SP3 on Exchange. I have to guess now, but Microsoft must have changed something in the transport/formatting information attached to the messages that the disclaimer agent was unable to understand, or the software added something that suddenly SP3 couldn't handle correctly. In any case, it was enough to make Outlook choke on plain text messages. It's unlikely that this would be a common issue as I'm sure most places that have QS Disclaimer software on the servers would actually be using it. I had only used it a few months and shut it down almost a year ago and forgotten about it. I did want to follow up my question just in case someone else searches for this issue. Microsoft spent a LOT of time looking at everything from TCP/IP captures to my DCs before they found the agent's footprint. BTW - QS Disclaimer has released a patch that fixes this issue, although my preference was to just uninstall it completely.

Thanks for sharing with us! Glad that the problem finally is solved for youJonas Andersson MCTS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010 | MCITP: EMA 2007/2010 | MCSE/MCSA Blog: http://www.testlabs.se/blog