I need your help people ;-)

I have a problem with messages coming into our Exchange Server and ones going out through it. Basically, the messages are stuck in the SMTP queue.

A message will come into the server, I can see it listed under "Exchange System Manager", but if you list the properties of the message queue it says something like

00:10 SMTP Message queued for local delivery

00:10 SMTP Message delivered locally to [email protected]

00:10 SMTP Message scheduled to retry local delivery

00:11 SMTP Message delivered locally to [email protected]

00:11 SMTP Message scheduled to retry local delivery

etc etc

For outgoing message list looks like this:

10:55 SMTP: Message Submitted to Advanced Queuing

10:55 SMTP: Started Message Submission to Advanced Queue

10:55 SMTP: Message Submitted to Categorizer

10:55 SMTP: Message Categorized and Queued for Routing

10:55 SMTP: Message Routed nad Queued for Remote Delivery

And the end - since then status didn't change, message is in queue, I am forcing connection from time to time but without an effect.

I checked connection with smarthost (used telnet for that) and everything seems to work correctly, so the problem is probably on exchange side. I am using Exchange Server 2003 running on Small Business Server 2003. I don't have any antivirus installed on server. Remaining free space on each partition is over 3Gb, on partition with data bases - it is over 12Gb. All was working good and without problems since 2005, problems started in half of this june - messages started going out and being stuck almost randomly (I don't see a pattern yet, some are going out, some are not, some are going after several hours).

I don't know what to do, what to check more, so please, any ideas?

Best regards, D.

edit

1. Priv1.edb has 14,5GB and priv1.stm 2,6GB - together those files have more than 16GB - can it be the reason? If yes, then what?

2. Indeed, I haven't thought that it can have something in common with my problem, but several users reported recent problems with Outlook Web Access - they can log in, they see the list of their mails, but they can't see the content of their emails. Although when they are connecting with Outlook 2003/2007 - there is no such problem, only with OWA there is.

edit2

So,.. It works now, and I have to admit that I am not really sure what the problem was (hope it won't come back).

What have I done:

1. Cleaned up some mailboxes to reduce size of them

2. Dismounted Information Store

3. Defragmentated data base files ( I used eseutil: c:\program files\exchsrvr\bin> eseutil /d g:\data base\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv1.edb )

4. Mounted Information Store back

5. ..and before I managed to do anything else - my queue started moving, elements which were kept there already for days - started moving and after few minutes everything was sent, both, outside and locally.

But: priv1.edb is still big (13 884 203 008), priv1.stm as well (2 447 384 576), so this is probably not the issue of size of the file. And if not this, so what was that?

And if that was issue of size of the file, then soon it will repeat - is there something I can do to avoid it ?