I have an Exchange server that uses a 3rd party SPAM appliance as a smarthost. It's been working great for a few years but suddenly I'm getting messages sitting the smarthostconnectordelivery queue with a status of Ready for approximately 5 minutes before sending. The good news is mail is moving, but always with a 5 minute rest in the queue before moving to the smarthost.
- There are no errors on the messages
- There are no errors on the queue
- The Protocol log doesn't shown any attempts to connect to the smart host until it has sat in the queue for about 5 minutes.
- The output of the queue is shown below
DeliveryType : SmartHostConnectorDelivery
NextHopDomain : smarthost-a.contoso.com,smarthost-b.contoso.com,smarthost-c.contoso.com
TlsDomain :
NextHopConnector : 8eb0ec78-bb81-486d-a194-65cee5be1e5d
Status : Active
MessageCount : 144
LastError :
LastRetryTime : 5/2/2013 2:52:34 PM
NextRetryTime :
DeferredMessageCount : 0
QueueIdentity : TRANSPORTSERVER\2970455
Identity : TRANSPORTSERVER\2970455
IsValid : True
The problem is very similar to the issue described here:http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchange2010/thread/f0b1a4ef-650d-4fe3-8838-4b4effbe47ed
I think the problem is smarthost related but Exchange is not giving any indication of failing to connect/getting deferred by the smarthost. Is there a log for this info?