Sitting by myself at work thinking:

‘this is a sloooow day, GOD, time is passing by so slowly, no problems today?? WTH, be careful what you wish for woman, not good not good, let this week be over’

Since I’m not acquainted with email servers and their configuration, I decided to start snooping around and reading.

I got a pen and pad and wrote down my observation and conclusions and troubleshooting steps since the email queue was getting larger and slowing the mail transfer process. Minor changes here and there. Then my phone rings:

‘They’re complaining no emails are going out’

‘Sh*t, what have I done’ see what happens when you get BORED!!

Since I’ve learned my lesson and knew panic attacks only clouds my judgement, I traced back my steps and knew the problem was because too many junk emails were holding off the server’s resource, the changes I‘ve made couldn‘t have sabotaged the server‘s functionality, once the junk emails were cleared the flow of emails were being sent. Breathe breathe, it is NOT your fault that your testing environment is the same as your live one, hehehehe. Anyway the problem isn’t solved entirely, emails still get queued along time before being sent.

So here what I have come up with so far in terms of general email server troubleshooting.

• Write down your thoughts, ideas, problem and possible causes and solutions. This I got out of one of the sites in troubleshooting email server
• Check out the event viewer on your email server. See if there is pattern or something odd happening. Search your findings.
• Check out any filtering applications that come along with antivirus application. Disable that and see if it solves your problem. It didn’t for mine.
• See what kind of emails are being blocked whether sent or received. Send to your company’s email account and receive using another account for example Hotmail or Yahoo an vice-versa. Make sure the problem is not related to attachment limitation, file type, etc. view any Non-delivery reports (NDRs) sent by your server, that will clarify some issues.
• Look at the email queue, see which SMTP links your server created. Through the ‘nslookup’ command try ‘telnet’ to the email server through port ‘25‘ just to make sure you are not on it‘s black list as a spammer. This can be done after writing the previous command, ‘set type=mx’ and write the domain name without the ‘www’ you don’t want the host record. Try telnet to the result. Usually some have more than one mx record for spam protection start with the minimum number because it has a higher priority and most probably your email server will try to contact it. If you can’t connect then that’s your problem, maybe you have DNS issues like not having a PTR record.

I’m still searching and trying to solve our problem. Write down the changes you made because you never know when you need to trace back take it from me. Any ideas for email troubleshooting you are welcome to share

Panic attacks, The sudden onset of intense anxiety, characterized by feelings of intense fear and apprehension and accompanied by palpitations, shortness of breath, sweating, and trembling.

Yes I’ve had those lately!! One of network admin’s worst nightmares, it to come early in the morning, sit and discover there is no Internet connection whatsoever in a network that she/he isn’t completely aware of. Talk about PANIC!!!

All what you supposedly know runs straight through the door and what is so obvious and trivial becomes impossible and hard to figure out.

Lesson learned:

• Go back to basics
• Don’t start blaming your ISP and calling them ‘min siba7 Allah ‘7eer’ claiming their DNS servers are down. hehehhehe, I hope they forgot ;P
• First and foremost if all the network is down, start by checking your router/gateway. The interface maybe down which can be done through simple telnet and few commands. In fact your Internet cable maybe and I’m saying maybe unplugged and that is your problem and you have annoyed and harassed poor ISP for nothing. Forgive me