Re: Tracing emails from outside clients

Thanks for your reply, Lanwench!

Earthlink hosts my DNS (sorry for not being precise in my original post)
mainly because of inertia: they were our original ISP and website hosts, and
though I've changed both of those I've never moved the DNS out of an
abundance of fear and caution. I got burned by a bad replication of DNS when
I changed public IPs several years ago. If ISPs are not good DNS hosts, what
do you consider to be the optimal choice for hosting DNS records?

The secondary server arrangement is just a legacy thing. I kind of like it
as an emergency backup.I have configured the manual forward on it.

As far as looking at queues, I didn't think there were any incoming queues
anymore on Exchange 2003. Just outgoing.

These senders can sporadically connect. If it were just a traffic issue,
then I would expect there to be a completely random distribution of emails
coming into the secondary server. But the same external senders show up
repeatedly, sending to the same users, which I guess is the main clue that
it's DNS on their side?

Thanks again for your help.

"Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]" wrote:

maitakeboy <maitakeboy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have a somewhat unique problem. I host my own mail server, an
Exchange 2003 with a Barracuda 300 spam and virus firewall sitting in
front of it.

My MX record is hosted by Earthlink, our ISP

Actually, correction: your DNS is hosted with them - and I would strongly
suggest moving away from them. They are not known to be very good DNS
hosts - ISPs generally aren't. And their support is dreadful.

. hey attach secondary
mail servers which they host, to our MX record

Sorry to be pedantic again, but you mean that your domain has multiple MX
records and theirs are higher-cost / lower preference MX records which go to
backup servers. I'm actually puzzled by this because I thought Earthlink
stopped doing "store and forward" for people a long time ago. What's the
reason you have this configuration?

. I get about 10 - 12
emails a day which get shunted to that secondary server which is then
automatically forwarded to me as the network admin.

By what means?

Most, but not all
of the messages sent to the secondary server, seem to be from 3 or 4
clients, for 3 or 4 of my users, which leads me to believe there is
some configuration issue, not simply a traffic issue. I'm having a
hard time diagnosing what's going on, since there are no "failures"
as far as the sending server is concerned. It just makes a connection
wiht the secondary server. Is it possible to trace this problem any
other way than disabling the secondary servers?

Not really, unless you're sitting in front of the senders' servers. Simplest
to change your MX records - especially as I wouldn't recommend sticking with
this configuration (nd especially with this host). If it's for backup
purposes, note that your senders' servers will retry delivery for several
days if your server is unavailable.

Would real-time
tracking of some sort show why the connection to the main server is
failing?

Your firewall logs might show them trying to connect, I guess.

Is ther real-time tracking available with Exchange?

No, but you can look in your queues.

Does
Message tracking show attempts to connect to the primary MX record,
before connecting to the secondary MX record? I had this problem
before the barracuda, btw. I had SAVMSE.

Nope.


Thanks for any help on this.

Have these senders ever been able tp semd to your users?



.

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