Steps+to+Troubleshoot+the+Mailfunction

Q: You are a network support technician for a college with 4000 users scattered over five locations. A group of users from the downtown location has called your help desk, complaining that they cannot send or receive messages from the Internet, although they can receive messages on the college's internal mail system. List the steps you will take to troubleshoot this problem and describe why each step is necessary. Suppose that your troubleshooting methodology leads you to determine that the problems were caused by a malfunctioning gateway. Suggest ways in which the problem could have been prevented.

Steps to troubleshoot the malfunction:- Aside from repairing a corrupted Exchange database, mail flow and email performance issues are the most challenging Exchange Server problems to diagnose. If users aren't receiving their email, the list of possible causes is endless. But it is also true that if you got message from your local sever then it minimizes the problem. Your receiving end protocol (like POP3) is working. It's usually pretty easy to tell if your spam filter is too aggressive or if an Exchange server is configured to filter out certain types of email messages. On the other hand, if the problem is related to the SMTP virtual server configuration on an Exchange server within your organization, the problem is a lot more difficult to diagnose and treat.

These are the following steps to Troubleshoot Mail Flow:

STEP 1: How to locate an email message in the SMTP queues? STEP 2: Troubleshooting the DSN Message Pending Submission queue. STEP 3: Troubleshooting the Failed Message Retry queue. STEP 4: Troubleshooting the Local Delivery queue. STEP 5: Troubleshooting the Messages Awaiting Directory Lookup queue. STEP 6: Troubleshooting the Messages Waiting To Be Routed queue. STEP 7: Troubleshooting the Final Destination Currently Unreachable queue. STEP 8: Troubleshooting the Messages