Emails Sent by Users are Stuck in Outbox/Draft Folder

ENVIRONMENT:

• Exchange 2007 with clustered mailbox Server running on Windows 2003 64bit
• 2 HUB & 2 CAS Servers
• SMPT gateway (Ironmail from McAfee)   

SYMPTOM:

Emails sent by users were stuck in Outbox/Drafts folder. We had infact asked some of the users to send 5-10 test emails for a couple of days to study the case. Some emails were also sent using iPhones and blackberry handheld. So the ground fact was  that, not all emails were received by the recipients. 2-3 emails were stuck in the Outlook’s Outbox or Draft folder. This was the case when emails were sent using OWA (outlook web access) as well.

CASE IDENTIFICATION DATA:

We escalated this issue with Microsoft and thru’ analysis of server logs confirmed that “MSExchange Store Driver - 1014” warnings were logged for the users who had faced the issue with emails stuck in the Outbox.

Issues encountered during the test case: 

Restarted the Microsoft Exchange Transport service on both HUB servers. Moved the 3 affected Users’ mailboxes to another mailbox database.

During the mailbox move, the operation was canceled manually, and when the problematic users tried to access their mailbox, they received an error stating that there’s currently a move operation running.

We got this sorted by running Clean-MailboxDatabase for the source and the destination mailbox databases. And moved the CCR CMS to the passive node.

All users including the affected users could access their mailbox normally.

ACTION PLAN:

move one of the affected mailbox to another database

The above plan didn't sort the issue though. 

By investigating the logs further we could find something fishy in Monitoring tool “Quest software” which was installed in your Exchange infrastructure. We also noticed that this monitoring tool can cause the generation of similar symptom that we are facing currently. So in order to isolate the issue, we temporarily disable all the Quest related services in the two Hub Servers and two Mailbox Servers for three days and kept the antennas  monitored for “MSExchange Store Driver - 1014” alert was generated repeatedly.

CAUSE:

A third party “Quest service” was installed in Exchange server which caused failure in MSExchange StoreDriver to open the message item and hence resulted in failure for submission.

RESOLUTION:

We had disabled the “Quest services” in Exchange servers and further to this no alerts were logged related to MSExchange Store Driver. Also during this period, users did not face the issue of emails stuck in Outbox/Drafts. We concluded that Quest services are incorrectly handling some emails which make the Emails stuck in Outbox.