Exchange Connections

Going to Exchange Connections conference next week. I'm really excited, and can't decide which sessions to attend between windows, exchange and sharepoint. Not to mention some vegas booze sounds like a nice break from the office. Check back and I'll post the cool stuff I learn.

ESMTP and PIX firewalls

If you have a PIX firewall be sure to disable SMTP packet inspection or you'll see some serious mail delays/failures with certain ISPs. For more info, see Cisco's article here:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/110/mailserver.html

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/vpndevc/ps2030/products_configuration_example09186a008067cf3b.shtml

Delayed Fan-Out Routing.

A previous post called 'a wierd one' may be solved with the info below, although i'm not entirely sure....the text below comes from a microsoft online course.

A message flow is disrupted if no Hub Transport server is available in the destination site. In such a situation, the message is routed to the closest Hub Transport server along the most optimal route. This is referred to as Queuing Messages at the Point of Failure.
The closest Hub Transport server then delivers the message when a Hub Transport server in the destination site becomes available. If a message has to be delivered to recipients at multiple sites, a copy of the message is delivered directly to the recipients at each site.
However, if destination Hub Transport servers are not available, then the source Hub Transport server delays making copies of the message for each recipient and sends a single message that is queued for delivery at the Hub Transport server that is closest to the destination sites.
When the destination sites become available, the queued message is sent to each site with a recipient. This is referred to as Delayed Fan-Out Routing.

Mailbox move fails if user password is expired

So I attempted moving a user mailbox back from 2003 to 2007 and it kept failing. Turns out, the user’s password was expired so exchange couldn’t open the source mailbox. I wonder if there will be a fix out for that. The same behavior also occurs when the user is set to ‘change password at next logon’

Phoenix Unified Communications User Group

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/phxunifiedcom/

We meet every other month. The yahoo groups site is just being started so check back. We cover OCS and Exchange.

Some Deep thoughts (a funny one I hope; jack handy style)

Sometimes I wonder if Exchange appreciates all the work i give it, or is it like that alchoholic uncle that makes you mow the lawn then do the truffle shuffle and only gives you a beer that you don't like anyway because your 10 :-)

A weird one

I'm currently running mixed Exchange 2003/2007 environment. I have all my DL's set to expand on on the 2007 hub tranport servers. During an Exchange 03 cluster failover, I sent an email to a DL that contained 15 users, all but 1 on Exchange 03. The message was not delivered until the 03 failover had completed.

Expected behaviour would have been that the message was delivered to the 2007 users and put in the RG connector queue for the 2003 user. I'll repost when i find out what the root cause is, assuming I can re-create.

Welcome to my blog

I thought i'd just start off by saying hello and thanks for stopping by. I'm an email admin for a medium sized company and I thought i'd start blogging about the exchange stuff i deal with.