XFOR: General Troubleshooting for Stuck Messages in Internet Mail Service

• Microsoft Exchange Server, version 5.5

SUMMARY

The Internet Mail Service may stop working, and log error messages in the application event log, such as event 4116, or Dr. Watson on the Store.exe file. This may be because a message is stuck in the Internet Mail Service queues.

MORE INFORMATION

You can use the following steps to correct for messages stuck in the Internet Mail Service queues:

1. In Control Panel, double-click Services, and then stop the Internet Mail Service.



2. Locate the Imcdata folder. To find this, either look at all the drives, or check the registry under the MSExchangeIMC\Parameters key for the location of the folder.



3. Create a temporary folder called TempIMS under the Imcdata folder.



4. In the Exchsrvr\Imcdata folder, delete the Queue.dat file.



5. Copy the two folders, Imcdata\IN and Imcdata\OUT, to the TempIMS folder.



6. Delete all the files in the Imcdata\IN and Imcdata\OUT folders.



7. Clear out the MAPI queues in MTS-IN and MTS-OUT in the information store. If the Exchange Server computer is a dedicated connector computer, you can simply delete the Priv.edb file and all of the log files, and restart the information store service. The MTS-IN and MTS-OUT folders will be recreated. Otherwise, if there are mailboxes on the Exchange Server computer, you need to use one of the following utilities: Gwclean, Profinst, or Mdbvu32.
   
   If you use Mdbvu32, run the Profinst program to install the MAPI profile to be used by Mdbvu32.


For additional information about how to view and delete messages in the MTS-IN and MTS-OUT queues, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q165505 How to View/Delete Messages in the MTS-IN and MTS-OUT queue

8. After you clear the queues, restart the information store and the Internet Mail Service. If this doesn't work, check the message transfer agent (MTA) queues. Run the mtacheck /V /F filename.txt command. You may want to use the /rd or /rl switches.



9. Replay the messages; stop the Internet Mail Service, delete the Queue.dat file, copy the TempIMC\IN and TempIMC\OUT files to the corresponding folders under Imcdata\IN and Imcdata\OUT, and restart the Internet Mail Service.
   
   If messages are not delivered to the Internet Mail Service for pickup, the MTA queue may be corrupted. To fix this problem, perform the following steps:



1. Run the mtacheck /v /f log.txt command.



2. Find the ID number for the Internet Mail Service queue, and all of the objects in that queue.



3. Delete the queue first, and the objects automatically associate back to the new queue. If this does not work, there is something wrong with the items in the queue, and you need to start deleting the items.

Additional query words:

Keywords : exc55
Version : winnt:5.5
Platform : winnt
Issue type : kbhowto