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Problems with Exchange 2003 message size between sites

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acjohnson posted on 09-18-2006 6:31 PM

Our current setup is two sites, each with one server running exchange 2003 standard. The sites are connected using a PPTP tunnel over a T1.

When a message is sent within a site to another mailbox, the message is delivered with no problems. If a message is sent from either site to a mailbox on the other site, the message will still be delivered but will be empty if it exceeds 10KB or so. If the message has an attachment that exceeds this limit, it will be empty with a file size of 64B. I believe I have looked through all possible settings that could potentially block messages exceeding this file size but have not been able to identify the problem.

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Top 10 Contributor
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Are these servers in different Exchange 2003 routing groups?

- Joel

Yes they are in seperate routing groups. The routing groups are connected using routing group connectors. I have tried putting then in the same routing group and resulted in the same problem. I also tried using a seperate smtp connector for each routing group instead of the routing group connector which also didn't make any difference.

Thanks

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Top 10 Contributor
Points 3,290

This is a strange problem indeed.  You might want to try and set the MTU down on the server to 1492(ish) to make sure that you aren't losing any DNF flagged packets. More info on this here: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=314825

Also, are you running SMTP fixup (Cisco MailGuard on any of the router/firewalls between the servers? 

- Joel

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I tried to set the MTU on both servers to the lowest possible setting which turned out to be 1372. The article you quoted says that the best MTU size is 1472. This did not fix the problem but actually caused problems with vpn clients using remote desktop, show I changed it back. Also I do not believe there is an SMTP fixup on the firewalls but I will have the appropriate administrator check.

 Any other ideas?

Thanks

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Top 10 Contributor
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What sort of antivirus software (both Exchange aware and file system) are your running?

- Joel

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We run symantec av 10. I tried disabling auto-protect on both servers and it did not make any difference.
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Top 10 Contributor
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You sure do have a unique problem.  If you send a mail via SMTP manually (either by telnetting to port 25 or using Outlook Express) from the local subnet and from the remote subnet and see if you still have the truncation problem.

 

- Joel

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Amazing! If I send an email to either of the remote servers using Outlook Express, it works! (making sure that I am using the correct SMTP server of coarse)

What is causing this? I used the Message Tracking Center to see if there was any differences in the delivery process, and the emails sent using an Outlook client first goes through an SMTP store driver, which is the only difference. Any ideas?

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Top 10 Contributor
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I am sorry we haven't found an answer for you yet.  Can you increase SMTP logging to maximum on both servers and then send an email both directions?  If there is anything interesting in the log you can either email me directly the events or post them here for everyone.

- Joel

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