I'm really having a bad day.
First, let me say that I have nt changed any settings in Exchange since I upgraded to Service Pack 2 a few months ago. There have been no patches or updates run since the beginning of May. I have not changed any settings on my firewall in the past several months. I have gone through every setting and verified that they are still the same.
Everything has been running rather smoothly for quite some time. As of some time this morning, things got rough. Very little email from outside of our domain is actually getting through to the recipients. I have run an unbelievable number of tests from outside email accounts. Every web-based email account that I have fails to get through. But I have had other people send me mail from their Exchange Server, and it gets through fine. I've also had a friend of mine send me an email through telnet without any problem. In addition, we have had mail from several other senders throughout the day, including Dell, a couple of different government agencies, and even a little bit of spam (although far less than normal).
Here are some of the bounce messages I've gathered:
from Gmail:
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
from Hotmail:
Action: failed
Status: 5.5.0
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
from Mail.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host mail.ourserver.com[70.xxx.
119.xxx]
said: 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable (in reply to RCPT
TO command)
from Yahoo!:
70.xxx.119.xxx does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
Giving up on 70.xxx.119.xxx.
from a friend with his own email domain (hosted by verizon):
Reason: Remote SMTP server has rejected address
Diagnostic code: smtp;550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
> Remote system: dns;mail.ourserver.com
> (TCP|206.xx.252.xxx|58455|
70.xxx.119
.xxx|25) (SMTP service ready)
a different one from Gmail (after I put the firewall in bypass):
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 550 5.2.1 Mail from 64.233.184.232 refused: spam site. (note: the IP is Google)
I've tried changing settings in Exchange, including disabling the Intelligent Message Filter, with zero success. As I said above, I even tried disabling the firewall. I'm running out of ideas. We use Symantec Mail Security for Exchange, but I checked the log, and there hasn't been anything blocked by SMSE since yesterday - and that is very unusual.
Anyone got any ideas? I'd give you 1,000 points if I could.
