Delayed Message Delivery/MWI problems

[dnmann]

I have several users that have had the following scenario. Someone will leave them a message at say 1:15 PM on Monday. They do not have an MWI lit or receive the message by say 4:00 PM monday. They receive another message Tuesday AM, at which point they MWI is lit, and they receive both the new message and the one from the previuos day in their inbox. I also have many users complaining that MWIs are not lit when a message comes in, but will lite some time later.<br><br>I have gone through the usual troubleshooting procedures and I have Unity set to resynch MWIs every day at 1:00 AM. I need some help on this one as the customer is prettty unhappy with the performance. Any ideas of what I can troubleshoot?<br><br>

[#2]

This sounds like it might be an MTA issue in Exchange... if there are RPC or DNS issues on the network messages can languish in the MTA queue on a box for hours or days before they're delivered to the home server. Remember that Unity is not involved in the message transport or doing any kind of syncronization... when we take a message it's delivered to Exchange immediately, we aren't hanging on to it in a proprietary DB and synching or the like.

Are these users homed on Exchange servers off the Unity box? Are the messages being delayed from outside callers or are they from internal subscribers or both? Any errors in the event log (i.e. RPC bind or bindback errors) on the Unity box and/or your other Exchange servers?

Here's a good article talking about how to troubleshoot MTA issues in general:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q247133

Someplace good to start anyway...


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Technical Lead/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[dnmann]

This is a voicemail only install so everyhting is on one server. AD, Exchange 2K, and Unity. I think the delayed messages are from both external callers as well as subscribers. I've got no errors relating to exchange or DNS in the Event log. Any other thoughts?

[#4]

Hmmm... that also rules out the clock synchronization issue that sometimes causes stuff like this (i.e. the time stamp on the message is set in the future by a few hours and we wont present the message to you until it rolls around).

Do you have a verifiable report of this for a particular user? If so you can run a subscriber message activity report for that person and we can at least eyeball it and make sure it's not something goofy like the message arriving while they're in their mailbox (which happens sometimes). Kinda doubt that but at least it would give us something to look at.

If you can verify this happening it'd be interesting to pop open the user's mailbox in Outlook and see if the message is there or not (i.e. if it's hung up in the UnityMTA directory for some reason).

The other thing to do is setup Exchange tracing to follow the path of messages through the system. Then when you get someone who reports that message X was somehow 2 hours late or whatever you can trace it from the entry point into the system till the time it got dumped into their mailbox and see where/if it's getting hung up.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Technical Lead/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[dnmann]

I don't have a good verifiable report at this moment, but I'm on the lookout for one. These guys aren't even using Outlook for mail. They access their mailboxes strictly via the phones. That's a good tip about the Exchange message tracking. I might give that a try.