KnowledgeBase Articles » Why am I seeing delivery failures with my Exchange Server, but I can see the messages were delivered?

Monday, August 12, 2013, 13:10

Why am I seeing delivery failures with my Exchange Server, but I can see the messages were delivered?

Category: General

Solution ID: 00000230

Summary:

I'm seeing messages saying "Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists: A communication failure occurred during the delivery of this message. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please try re-sending this message later, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator." The message says delivery failed for all the recipients but when I check I see some of them were delivered! What's going on here?

Answer:

The problem lies with how your Exchange environment deals with SMTP error messages. We can't say for certain, but we believe it has to do with the structural complexity of e-mail and how that structure changes as e-mail moves from server to server. Your Exchange server may be assigning a single "delivery status" for each message, when in fact e-mail is much more complex than that. You can have multiple delivery results for a single message with multiple recipients. In fact you can see this in the details of the status message Exchange generates; it looks like it wants to say the "message" failed (reporting all recipients as failed) when in reality it could be a single address that fails.

It may be an Exchange configuration error, or there may be a problem with the Exchange software. Make sure your exchange server is fully patched. If the problem persists you may need to seek the advice of a Microsoft Exchange expert or contact Microsoft for further support.

Tags: microsoft, exchange, dsn, delivery, failure, recipients, errors

Link to this article: https://perfectmail.com/kb/delivery_failures_with_exchange_but_delivered

Updated: Monday, August 12, 2013, 13:10

-- David Rutherford