markus’ blog

Suddenly cannot access emails – what happened to the M$ server?

January 13th, 2005

Such problems exactly start to when you really don’t need them. A new year, new projects, emails are tumbling in .. and suddenly, they stop. No emails. What’s up with out Microsoft Exchange Server?

A day later things are not more clearer than what the administration companies says. They tried everything they have read in knowledge bases. Tried newsgroups. Spent hours of hours installing fixes, packs and whatnot. Countless reboots. No change.

Then suddently, no one knows why, the services seemed to work like in old days. But this only lasted for a day. The next day, it began from the start.

A more technical in-depth description of the current status:

• Emails are accepted by the server and are delivered to the users.
• Users on their workstation fire up Outlook but don’t see any new emails.
• Accessing emails with OWA is not possible, but the users see them in their listing.
• Sending emails is no problem.

Some more wierdness: it does not apply to all users.
An interesting finding: through the properties of the Inbox the permissions are set to standard with no rights and anonymous, with no rights, too. However, accessing older emails in the inbox folder is possible. Just new ones are now shown.

I’ll update this article as I get new information. If you’ve any hints, feel free to post them (but note that I’m not in charge of administration).

Status 21.01.2005:
Still to change, emails are not working properly. Afaik a “call to microsoft” has been done, but not yet sure what this means to us. A proposed plan suggested that on coming monday we will export all our emails from the exchange server.

Status 24.0.1.2005:
Our administration company solved the problem by:

• Letting everyone export all their emails to a local PST
• nformation from all Exchange accounts
• Have (a day later) everyone copy all folders from the PST back to the exchange

Unfortunately all contacts and calendar entries have been lost. At least receiving email works again. The cause for this wierd problem has never been found.

Entry Filed under: General