XCON: Mail Delivery is Significantly Delayed When a Recipient Sends a Message to a Personal Address Book Entry

When a recipient (an individual who has a mailbox on an Exchange 2000 computer) sends a message to a particular e-mail address that is listed in the recipient�s Personal Address Book, you (the administrator) experience the following symptoms on the Exchange 2000 computer. These symptoms also occur when the recipient sends a message to a personal distribution list that contains a particular e-mail address from the recipient�s Personal Address Book. The symptoms include the following:

• The message is not immediately delivered. The message remains in the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) connector queue.
• The SMTP connector status changes to RETRY and mail delivery is significantly delayed until you remove this message.
• You cannot copy the message that is stuck from the Exchange 2000 Installable File System (IFS) drive (typically, drive M).
• If you increase diagnostic logging to level 7 for the MSExchangeTransport component on the Exchange 2000 computer, the following event appears in the application log of the Windows Event Viewer:

  Event Type: Warning
  Event Source: MSExchangeTransport
  Event Category: Exchange Store Driver
  Event ID: 327
  Date: date
  Time: Time
  User: N/A
  Computer: ServerName
  Description: The following call: EcGetMime to the store failed. Error code: -2147024809. MDB: 049ed31b-75b3-459d-8fe0-6dbaffa4a959. FID: 1-34. MID: 1-96B3. File: .
  For more information, click http://search.support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1.

This issue occurs if part of the SMTP address of the Personal Address Book entry alias that the message is sent to is blank. An example is a user in the Personal Address Book who has an e-mail address of Name < > instead of Name <name@example.com>. In this scenario, Exchange 2000 Server appends the local SMTP address to the blank alias. For example, if the local SMTP address is @contoso.com, the blank e-mail Name < > becomes @contoso.com without the alias (without name).

To resolve this issue, delete the message that is stuck from the Exchange 2000 computer, and then remove the Personal Address Book entry that contains the SMTP address that is not valid.