E-Mails Not Delivered
I am running SBS 2003 and use the POP3 connector to collect e-mails and
deliver to seven mailboxes in our organisation (using a combination of global
and user mailboxes).
A few weeks ago, it came to our attention that some of our incoming e-mails
were going missing. To monitor this I disabled automatic collection of
e-mails by the POP3 connector and set up the e-mail accounts locally using
Outlook Express (keeping a copy of the messages on the server for later
collection by the POP3 connector) in order to 'intercept' our incoming
e-mails before they are delivered to the various mailboxes. By comparing the
messages that we recieve in OE, with those delivered to our mailboxes when
delivery is invoked manually in the POP3 connector, I have managed to
establish that we are indeed losing the odd e-mail. However I have been
unable to establish any pattern - it just appears that the occasional random
e-mail is discarded. The discarded messages can occur mid-thread in a
conversation on a discussion forum (which was how I discovered the problem
initially - by noticing replies to earlier messages in the thread that I had
not recieved). When I asked a friend to re-send an earlier message that I'd
not recieved, I recieved the re-sent message OK, so it wouldn't appear to be
anything to do with the message sender or message content.
On checking the event viewer it would appear that the POP3 connector is
functioning correctly, dowloading all of the messages and correctly
establishing which mailbox they should be routed to - i.e. no errors or
warnings are generated in the Application event log. The odd message is just
mysteriously not arriving in the mailbox (neither inbox nor junk folder) that
it was supposed to be routed to. Nor are the affected message ending up the
Failed Mail folder.
Obviously the process of having to intercept the messages using OE and
invoking collection by the POP3 connector manually, to avoid losing any
messages, is quite cumbersome and time consuming. Therefore I am quite
anxious to find a solution so that I can confidently revert to using the POP3
connector to automatically collect our e-mails every 15 minutes.
Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Douglas Bingham
date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 02:35:00 -0700
author: Douglas Bingham
