K
Kelvin
Hi,
We have one client reporting that he intermittently does not receive
external e-mails sent to him. This has been an ongoing problem for months now
and is becoming a critical issue as he is starting to miss out on business
critical mails intermittently.
Here are the facts on the issue that we have so far :-
a) As far as we know, he has never missed any internal mails.
b) Emails that go missing may or may not have attachments but does happen
more often with emails that do have attachments
c) If the "missing" mail is addressed to multiple receipients in the office,
all the others have no problem receiving the email, just not this one person
d) All PCs on the network run the same AV software - Symantec AV Corporate
edition - no special rules or filters are setup for any user - everyone's the
same. We had a look and have found no unusual or suspicious applications /
utilities on his desktop PC that might cause such a thing to happen.
e) His PC has been replaced before and he was experiencing the problem on
his old PC and it continues to happen with his new PC
f) We have disabled any and all Rules in Outlook that we can find with no
change to the problem
g) We setup a new account on the SBS 2003 server (called Mailmonitor) and
then set the Exchange Delivery Option on his account to both Forward a copy
of all emails to the new Mailmonitor account as well as deliver to his own
mailbox. Watching the emails in the two mailboxes over a few days, we found
that there are indeed mails addressed to this user that appear in the
Mailmonitor mailbox but NOT in his own mailbox ! This implies that the mails
are getting to the server and the server knows it is meant for him (thus
forwarding a copy to the mailmonitor account) but for whatever reason it does
not appear in his mailbox.
h) We have performed searches on his entire mailbox and the missing mails
cannot be found in any folder within his mailbox.
i) As mentioned earlier, the problem is intermittent - if alerted to a
missing mail (usually when his customer rings to complain why he failed to
respond to their email) and the original sender sends the same email to him
again, the email almost always comes in this time around. This makes it very
difficult to troubleshoot as we can never predict when an email will not come
in.
The situation is fast becoming serious and the user (being an important
person in the company hierarchy as well) is getting extremely frustrated at
the continuing problem just as we are frustrated that there is no way to
force the issue to occur in order to perform tests (and we are running out of
ideas as to what more to test as well).
We have suggested that we backup his mailbox and delete his entire account
off the server then recreate it to see if this would solve the problem but he
is at present unwilling to let us do this.
Help ! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Regards,
Kelvin
We have one client reporting that he intermittently does not receive
external e-mails sent to him. This has been an ongoing problem for months now
and is becoming a critical issue as he is starting to miss out on business
critical mails intermittently.
Here are the facts on the issue that we have so far :-
a) As far as we know, he has never missed any internal mails.
b) Emails that go missing may or may not have attachments but does happen
more often with emails that do have attachments
c) If the "missing" mail is addressed to multiple receipients in the office,
all the others have no problem receiving the email, just not this one person
d) All PCs on the network run the same AV software - Symantec AV Corporate
edition - no special rules or filters are setup for any user - everyone's the
same. We had a look and have found no unusual or suspicious applications /
utilities on his desktop PC that might cause such a thing to happen.
e) His PC has been replaced before and he was experiencing the problem on
his old PC and it continues to happen with his new PC
f) We have disabled any and all Rules in Outlook that we can find with no
change to the problem
g) We setup a new account on the SBS 2003 server (called Mailmonitor) and
then set the Exchange Delivery Option on his account to both Forward a copy
of all emails to the new Mailmonitor account as well as deliver to his own
mailbox. Watching the emails in the two mailboxes over a few days, we found
that there are indeed mails addressed to this user that appear in the
Mailmonitor mailbox but NOT in his own mailbox ! This implies that the mails
are getting to the server and the server knows it is meant for him (thus
forwarding a copy to the mailmonitor account) but for whatever reason it does
not appear in his mailbox.
h) We have performed searches on his entire mailbox and the missing mails
cannot be found in any folder within his mailbox.
i) As mentioned earlier, the problem is intermittent - if alerted to a
missing mail (usually when his customer rings to complain why he failed to
respond to their email) and the original sender sends the same email to him
again, the email almost always comes in this time around. This makes it very
difficult to troubleshoot as we can never predict when an email will not come
in.
The situation is fast becoming serious and the user (being an important
person in the company hierarchy as well) is getting extremely frustrated at
the continuing problem just as we are frustrated that there is no way to
force the issue to occur in order to perform tests (and we are running out of
ideas as to what more to test as well).
We have suggested that we backup his mailbox and delete his entire account
off the server then recreate it to see if this would solve the problem but he
is at present unwilling to let us do this.
Help ! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Regards,
Kelvin
