asked on

Why would Exchange 2003 send 2 months worth of email a second time after a power failure.

One of our clients servers went down over a weekend and was brought back online on Monday morning . After it went back online, a slew of emails from the past 2 months that had already been sent appear to have been resent. they received numerous delivery failure notifications from these, as well as calls from confused business associates relating to others that went through successfully. We have searched Google for info on this issue with no luck. Any idea what might have caused this to occur, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again.

dlicence

This sounds like the transaction log from the last two months has been replayed, and as a result all previous emails have been resent. This would only be possible if the Exchange database had not been correctly backed-up for the last two months. Here is some more info about transaction logs:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124452(EXCHG.65).aspx
http://www.msexchange.org/articles/Understanding-Exchange-Information-Store.html

If this is the reason you are very lucky that the DB wasn't corrupted.

Hope this helps
Duncan

kieran_b

Transaction logs dont replay themselves though.

I would be expecting that you have Anti-virus installed on the server, and it has been holding onto the messages - when you restarted the SMTP service (by rebooting the server) they all went again.

Prevention? Uninstall the AV - it is pointless on the server itself anyway.

MTPHelp

ASKER

dlicence,

The log files might have been the issue, but the backup has been running successfully and that clears the log files. So I don't think this is the issue. There are 79 log files in the MDBDATA folder, but they are only from the last 3 days. I don't think we have any way of knowing what the list of log files looked like the day this happened.

kieran_b,

SAV might have caused it, but removing the antivirus software is not an option.

Still looking for more opinions on this issue.

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kieran_b

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MTPHelp

ASKER

It is actually Symantech System Center 10.1, and SAV 10.1 is also installed on the server. I am not seeing the Mail Security software on there at all. Could SAV still be causing it?

kieran_b

If you don't even have Mail Security installed, I would uninstall all of the symanted stuff. The only kind of AV that is of any use on an Exchange server is one that is built for Exchange (and even that is questionable).

If it is just SAV, I am not surprised that you have this problem - uninstall it, it is doing nothing.