Question : Why the Delivery Delay

   I am a newly appointed Exchange 2000 Administrator and I am in the process of learning more about the inner bits and pieces of Exchange.  
     
     I have noticed that some of my co-workers are complaining that they are not receiving E-Mails from certain people. So in response I check several places. One place I check is the Exchange System Manager (Message Tracking Center and Search by Sender and then research by recipient). Another place I check is the bad mail folder and the filter folder. I check the Queue folder as well as the user’s outlook box and web-mail. After checking all these places I start to think the E-Mail never reached us but as a newbie I can't be sure. Where else can I look and what else can I do to jostle this message free if it is stuck on our server. I really need as much detail as can be provided because when I find tools like the Message Tracking Center I love it (This example is meant to point out my level of clueless-ness). Most importantly if you know of a tool that when you found it you said hey that was cool please let me know because as I mentioned I am still learning about Exchange and I am probably not aware of all the cool utilities built into Exchange 2000. Thanks for all your help.

Answer : Why the Delivery Delay

Basically, a queue is where a message is stored until it is delivered. Most messages spend seconds or less in a queue, but if there is a problem with the delivery, they will wait there until either delivery is possible or they expire and are returned to the sender. On 2000, outgoing queues for messages are named by the domain where messages are destined for. This is to make it easier to see when there is a problem sending to a specific domain (like AOL.com) and it can be resolved without having to look through the entire outgoing queue to find common domains when troubleshooting

If you enumerate the queues (select one of the queues and right-click and choose enumerate), look to see how many messages are there and what the subject is. Most likely they are NDRs (undeliverable messages) on spam sent to unkown users on your system. Since most spammers don't use legitimate email addresses, those NDRs will sit in queue until they expire. If there are hundreds or thousands and the subject doesn't look like an NDR, then you have other issues besides the one you posted here:)