XCON: Messages That Are Sent to Fax Recipients Return an NDR; Fix Requires Exchange 2000 SP2

After you send a message to a fax recipient, you may receive a non-delivery report (NDR) that indicates that the address was incorrect. The text of the NDR shows that the area code was changed to an ASCII character. This problem occurs with area codes that are contained in parentheses that are in the range from (000) through (299).

This problem can occur because the X.400 specification dictates that only certain types of characters are allowed in the address of a message. Extended characters, such as accented characters, do not fit this description. To allow for extended characters such as these, the X.400 specification specifies the encoding of these characters by using a syntax that is very similar to United States area codes (this is referred to as "escaping" a character). For example, the O circumflex character is escaped as (212), which is also a New York area code.

While the information store is parsing data that it received from the MTA, the information store determines whether the address contains any escaped characters, and then "unescapes" those characters.

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:


NOTES: Because of file dependencies, this update requires Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 2.

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 3.

After this fix is applied, if the information store determines that the address contains a sequence that is part of the range that is described in the "Symptoms" section of this article, a further check is made to determine whether the remaining characters are part of a phone number. If the characters are part of a phone number, no unescaping is performed. If the characters are not part of a phone number, unescaping is performed as described in the "Cause" section of this article.