Summary:

Occasionally, a badly-formatted message will be put by the relay into the EMF Inbound queue, and this message never leaves the queue, bogging down the policy engine. This technote describes a last-resort procedure to manually move the message out of the Inbound queue into the Quarantine queue, so that the message can be analyzed.

This technote should not be considered a normal maintenance procedure. EMF has built-in processes to handle messages that may be stuck in Inbound.

Symptom:

You observe one or more of the following:

• the EMF policy engine is unable to process the email
• the message has been in the Inbound queue for many hours
• you are unable to delete the message
• the server processor usage rises close to 100%

You need to use Enterprise Manager and SQL to manually move the message out of Inbound, usually to the Quarantine queue, so that the message can be analyzed.

Resolution:

Perform the following steps to move the message:

- stop the policy engine (content) service
- open Inbound and note the exact arrival time (Date) of the bad message
- open Query Analyzer, using the MMSMail database, and run the following:

select messageID,receivedTime from RelayStoreMessageHeaders where queueName = 'inco' order by receivedTime;

- locate the message with the correct arrival time in the query results, and right-click on messageID > Copy
- in the EMF webadmin, open the Quarantine queue Setup, and make sure that the message retention period is long enough to accommodate the bad message
- in Query Analyzer run the following:

update RelayStoreMessageHeaders set queueName = 'quar'
where messageID = '{paste-the-message-ID}';

delete from EngineMessagesInProcess where messageID = '{paste-the-message-ID}';

- open the Quarantine queue in the webadmin and verify that the message is there
- restart the policy engine (content) service

Once the message is in Quarantine, see if you can open it. If you can:

- try selecting View message events... to see if there are any telltale events giving us more information about the bad format
- select Save message..., and send Tumbleweed Support the message file

If you cannot open the message:

- see if you can view the message's SMTP Recipient, and note the recipient
- Release Message to Recipients

Once the recipient has the message, see if you can obtain a copy of it, and send Tumbleweed Support the message file.

Once Support has the suspect message, we can analyze it and take appropriate action.