EV & Journal Mailbox NDR's

[RogerP]

Hi,

We are currently implementing an Enterprise Vault archive solution but have an issue with journalling.

Some users are receiving NDR's:

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

      Subject:    RE:NDR's
      Sent:    4/7/2011 9:57 AM

The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:

      journalmailbox on 4/7/2011 9:57 AM
            A configuration error in the e-mail system caused the message to bounce between two servers or to be forwarded between two recipients.  Contact your administrator.
            <journalmailboxserver #5.4.6>

We have several SMTP domains and this is happening when a user sends an email from a smtp domain to another smtp domain for e.g.

sistercompany.com > maincompany.com.

The mail comes through its just the journal mailbox sends an NDR to the sender.

I have tried what's mentioned here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324732 about the recipient policy (Click to clear the This Exchange organization is responsible for all mail delivery to this address check box.) but users are still getting NDR's.

I appreciate this seems to be an exchange server related issue but just wondered if anyone has had this issue and successfully resolved it.

We are an Exchange 2003/Server 2003 environment with geographically dispersed mailbox servers.

Cheers.

[JesusWept3]

I've seen this before in companies environments and usually they have had to get Microsoft involved to help properly set these up, i know its not incredibly helpful saying "contact microsoft" but most Enterprise Vault admins have little to do with the Exchange infrastructure and how its set up and configured.

Hopefully someone here may provide more assistance

[AndrewB]

I haven't seen this issue myself but according to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/843105/ -

Question: Why do I receive a looping NDR 5.4.6 when I send e-mail to users and to the journal recipient?

Answer:This is expected. The journal recipient does not receive e-mail typically like other users. The journal recipient must be hidden from the Global Address List. During categorization, the journal copy should be bifurcated from the beginning of the envelope chain. When the journal recipient is listed first on the list, the categorizer detects a potential loop and then generates an NDR.

There's a lot of discussion on this forum whether or not to hide the journal mailbox once it's been setup in EV for archiving. a lot of people say they do it and according to the MS article it might help in your situation.

[RogerP]

Hi,

Thanks for the response,unfortunatley we have tried this but we are still seeing NDR's sent back to the user.

[RogerP · Accepted solution]

For the benefit of the community and to help Googlers I thought I would post the fix as I could not find the answer anywhere...

We bit the bullit and finally decided to raise a support call with Microsoft.

The answer was to move the Journal mailbox to its own Mailstore (one that does not have journaling enabled in the mailstore properties). This mailstore only contains the journal mailbox. Voila no more NDR's.

As Microsoft came up with that pretty quickly and did not need to run any diagnosis software they refunded the support cost.

[MarkBarefoot]

Thanks for sharing your answer - it's good for others to see :)

Can you mark the post as Resolved?

[AndrewB]

Glad you figured it out!