XCON: Message Transfer Agent Repeatedly Fails to Start with Event 155 or Event 164

The message transfer agent (MTA) does not start after repeated attempts (usually after first logging an attempt to perform database recovery), and the last MTA error logged in the application event log is Event 155 or Event 164, which reports that an object with an invalid DN could not be read from the directory. The Event 155 may be similar to the following:

This behavior may occur when the MTA is not shut down cleanly and has messages in its queues. Specifically, if the MTA is shut down after a fatal error during object parsing, it is possible that the object in the database is saved partly parsed. Then, when you try to restart the MTA, the MTA uses binary data from one of the message properties as a distinguished name for the Active Directory object lookup.

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: The English version of this fix should have the following file attributes or later:

Component: MTA

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server. This problem was first corrected in Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 1.