Mail stuck in deferred queue

While I have raised this issue in this group before I have not had any real response to help me solve the problem. I have taken many steps to try and trace the cause of the behaviour without success but I can now further describe what appears to happen.

First a pre-amble to the history of the configuration. We have domainA (servicing domaina.com and domainb.com) in which there were two servers. A group of users (with mail addresses of domainb.com) in a remote office were not being serviced effectively by this configuration and since they were effectively operationally independent a new SBS was installed. The new server was put into a new domainB, the MX record altered to a new pop3 catchall and the domainb.com mail addresses removed from the active directory user accounts on domainA. There are still reasons why the user accounts were to remain on domainB so they weren't deleted and their mail accounts on the original server still exist. So with new user accounts in domainB SBS they happily received and sent mail.

The problem occurred when a user on domainA tried to send a mail to user@xxxxxxxxxxx and it didn't arrive. If they pick the name off the global address list it was delivered to the mailbox on exchange in domainA but not to the new server via the internet using the full address. All other domains posed no problem.

I first checked that there was no reference remaining on the DNS or address templates of domainA's servers and did a reboot. I also verified that on the server with Exchange in domainA that a ping to mail.domainb.com resolved to the correct address, which it did.

Looking at the queues in Exchange in domainA the following occurs. A mail is sent to user@xxxxxxxxxxxx A default SMTP virtual server for domainb.com is created but the mail sits in the messages queued for deferred delivery and are never delivered.

There are no further errors that I can see to give me any indication of what is going wrong.

I hope someone can offer any assistance as this has been unresolved for so long it has become a real problem with the management.

Regards,

Martin

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Relevant Pages

  • AD crash
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  • RE: AD crash
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  • Re: Assigning Security through W2k3 to W2k Trusted Domains
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  • Re: Mail stuck in deferred queue
    ... In Exchange system manager recipients/recipient ... The new server was put into a new domainB, ... >removed from the active directory user accounts on domainA. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
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