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Exchange Troubleshooting

Delivery is delayed to these recipients or groups

Symptom:

After sending an email (with Outlook, but the same can happen using OWA or any email client connected to Exchange), the following message is generated by Exchange:

Delivery is delayed to these recipients or groups:

Someone (their@email-address)

Subject: Original message subject

This message hasn't been delivered yet. Delivery will continue to be attempted.

The server will keep trying to deliver this message for the next 1 days, 19 hours and 53 minutes. You'll be notified if the message can't be delivered by that time.

where "their@email-address" is the email address of the intended recipient, "Original message subject" is the subject of that sent message. The time will be different.

Cause:

This is an information message telling you that Exchange could not deliver the message but that it will try again.

Possible Remedies:

Only the Exchange administrator can investigate the cause of this message. If you are a user then forward the message to your Exchange administrator and ask him/her to investigate.

• Do nothing.

  The message says that Exchange will try again to deliver the message. Email servers do go down and mostly they come back up again.

  That said, Exchange only generates this message after it has been trying to deliver the message for a day, so it may be wise to investigate.

• Use the Queue Viewer to see why the email has not yet been delivered:
  1. Start up Exchange Management Console
  2. Open the Toolbox
  3. Open "Message Tracking"
  4. Find the message in the list.
  5. Open its properties and look at the "last error". This will tell you the reason why the email has not yet been delivered.

  Unfortunately when you open "Message Tracking" you may see the following error:

  Microsoft Exchange

  Cannot process argument transformation on parameter 'BookmarkObject'. Cannot convert the "Microsoft.Exchange.Data.QueueViewer.PropertyBagBasedMessageInfo" value of type "Deserialized.Microsoft.Exchange.Data.QueueViewer.PropertyBasedMessageInfo" to type "Micrsoft.Exchange.Data.QueueViewer.ExtensibleMessageInfo".

  If you get this error then you will need to use the Exchange Management Shell approach below. Microsoft are aware of the error but appear to have no interest in fixing it (for Exchange Server 2010 at least).

• Use Exchange Management Shell to see why the email has not yet been delivered:

  1. Start Exchange Management Shell
  2. To view all the messages in the message queue use:

     get-queue | get-message

     For example:

     [PS] C:\> get-queue | get-message

      

     Identity          FromAddress     Status  Queue      Subject

     CRYER\509\710612  brian@cryer...  Ready   CRYER\509  Enhance...

     If you cannot see the message listed then it has probably already been delivered, in which case you don't need to take any further action.

  3. To view details of the first message in the queue use:

     get-queue -identity queue-id | fl

     Be sure to use the correct identity ('queue-id') for your queue. For example:

     [PS] get-queue -identity CRYER\509 | fl

      

     RunspaceId            : 5ab82e82-3093-427b-bb5c-8fa504862672

     DeliveryType          : DnsConnectorDelivery

     NextHopDomain         : example.com

     TlsDomain             :

     NextHopConnector      : ece601d0-2275-4f13-b2af-72811f089873

     Status                : Retry

     MessageCount          : 1

     LastError             : 451 4.4.0 DNS query failed

     LastErrorTime         : 23/06/2016 10:36:38

     NextRetryTime         : 23/06/2016 10:46:53

     DeferredMessageCount  : 0

     QueueIdentity         : CRYER\509

     Identity              : CRYER\509

     IsValid               : True

  4. Look at the "LastError" line from the above. That will indicate what the underlying error is. Resolve that and the email should go.

These notes have been tested with Exchange Server 2010.