SMTP Connector Queue Oddity

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Hi All,

Recently i`ve noticed something odd about mailflow destined for external
domains via the SMTP server on our Exchange 2003 Enterprise (no SP as yet)
server. Mail for external domains seems to hang in the SMTP connectors queue
until about 20-30 mails have built up and then the queue is flushed and the
mail is sent (This is what i have witnessed as i refreshed the queue whilst
monitoring it over a set period of time). I find this curious as the SMTP
connector which forwards to our 2 smarthost mail gateways (They run Symantec
Mail Security for SMTP 4.1) has its schedule set to "always on" and i
haven`t noticed this kind of delay before. It causes an issue when there
isn`t a high throughput of mail destined for external domains as the queue
will hang in this fashion and delay until a certain amount of mail is queued,
a test mail to one of my hotmail accounts during one of these periods took
just over half an hour for delivery. Looking at the message traking log for
this mail yielded these results:

22/11/2005 17:26 SMTP Store Driver: Message Submitted from Store
22/11/2005 17:26 SMTP: Message Submitted to Advanced Queuing
22/11/2005 17:26 SMTP: Started Message Submission to Advanced Queue
22/11/2005 17:26 SMTP: Message Submitted to Categorizer
22/11/2005 17:26 SMTP: Message Categorized and Queued for Routing
22/11/2005 17:26 SMTP: Message Routed and Queued for Remote Delivery
22/11/2005 17:31 SMTP: Message Submitted to Advanced Queuing
22/11/2005 17:31 SMTP: Started Message Submission to Advanced Queue
22/11/2005 17:31 SMTP: Message Submitted to Categorizer
22/11/2005 17:31 SMTP: Message Categorized and Queued for Routing
22/11/2005 17:31 SMTP: Message Routed and Queued for Remote Delivery
22/11/2005 17:34 SMTP: Message Submitted to Advanced Queuing
22/11/2005 17:34 SMTP: Started Message Submission to Advanced Queue
22/11/2005 17:34 SMTP: Message Submitted to Categorizer
22/11/2005 17:34 SMTP: Message Categorized and Queued for Routing
22/11/2005 17:34 SMTP: Message Routed and Queued for Remote Delivery
22/11/2005 17:40 SMTP: Message Submitted to Advanced Queuing
22/11/2005 17:40 SMTP: Started Message Submission to Advanced Queue
22/11/2005 17:40 SMTP: Message Submitted to Categorizer
22/11/2005 17:40 SMTP: Message Categorized and Queued for Routing
22/11/2005 17:40 SMTP: Message Routed and Queued for Remote Delivery
22/11/2005 17:50 SMTP: Message Submitted to Advanced Queuing
22/11/2005 17:50 SMTP: Started Message Submission to Advanced Queue
22/11/2005 17:50 SMTP: Message Submitted to Categorizer
22/11/2005 17:50 SMTP: Message Categorized and Queued for Routing
22/11/2005 17:50 SMTP: Message Routed and Queued for Remote Delivery
22/11/2005 17:55 SMTP: Message Submitted to Advanced Queuing
22/11/2005 17:55 SMTP: Started Message Submission to Advanced Queue
22/11/2005 17:55 SMTP: Message Submitted to Categorizer
22/11/2005 17:55 SMTP: Message Categorized and Queued for Routing
22/11/2005 17:55 SMTP: Message Routed and Queued for Remote Delivery
22/11/2005 18:00 SMTP: Started Outbound Transfer of Message
22/11/2005 18:00 Message transferred to gateway2.vcint.com through SMTP

Now to me that doesn`t look right, i don`t see why the mail was looped back
to the Advanced Queueing engine that many times? SMTP logs didn`t show much
out of the ordinary though. I also tested network connectivity between our
gateways and our AD DC`s from the mail server and the possibility of this
being some sort of lookup issue via DNS but all were working fine.

I really can`t see why this behaviour is occurring, especially since no SMTP
virtual server or connector settings have been changed in the past month or
so. We haven`t tested SP2 for Exchange 2003 sufficiently yet, perhaps we
should apply that and see if it makes a difference?

Any help would be appreciated,

Cheers,

Chris Murchison
.

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