Diagnosing Queuing Problems – Part II

Over the last 2 days we have been seriously polishing our "magnifying glasses" in effort to improve our mail delivery efficiency. Thursday, we covered the basics of the queue manipulation commands. Yesterday, we covered how to use those commands to address the most common mail queuing issues.

Diagnosing Mail Queuing Problems – Part I

With yesterday's posting covering the basics of the queue viewer commands (Playing Traffic Cop – Commands for Working with the Exchange Mail Queues), we now have a new set of tools to allow us to fulfill our role as the "Sherlock Holmes of NDRs". With that said, most mail flow interruption scenarios that can usually be classified in one the following categories:

• Cannot connect to destination machine to deliver mail
• Messages stuck in a delivery queue, but destination is working properly
• Messages rejected by destination
• Cannot route one or more recipients of a message
• Messages stuck in the submission queue
• Messages show in the poison queue
  

Playing Traffic Cop – Commands for Working with the Exchange Mail Queues

So far this week, we have talked about how to react when Exchange has given up on a message and returned an NDR. Starting today and continuing the rest of the week, we will be discussing how to step in and be the traffic cop to help direct traffic around congestion, "road construction", and other obstacles before the dreaded NDR event happens. There are a number of tools available in the Exchange environment to help diagnose the problem and restore normal traffic flow. These tools include the queue viewer, protocol logging, connectivity logging, message tracking, etc. This article is going to focus on how to use the queue viewer commands to diagnose mail flow interruptions.