SYMPTOMS
Error messages are issued by the Exclaimer Email Archive service when it cannot process a message in the journal mailbox or when it cannot write a message to the archive database. This error message may be repeated over time.
CAUSE
Each time the archiver service is started, the journal mailbox is processed. Messages which cannot be processed because they cannot be opened, read, deleted or written to the archive database are marked as problem messages and then retried later. After two retries, a warning mail is sent to the archive administrator indicating that attention may be required.
WORK AROUND
Sometimes restarting the Exclaimer Email Archive service or the Exchange store will alleviate this problem, but other times, it is necessary to investigate the journal mailbox directly.
To do this,
- Give yourself rights to the mailbox. The mailbox is normally called "Exclaimer Email Archiver Service" and can be found in the AD Organizational unit "Exclaimer Email Archiver".
- Once you have access to the mailbox, add it to your Outlook profile.
- Open the journal mailbox's inbox and view the contents.
- The problem message should be clearly identified in the error reports.
- Delete or move the problem message(s).
APPLIES TO
- All version of Exclaimer Email Archiver service
MORE INFORMATION
There are four classes of error that are considered by the archiver service.
- Failed to open message in Exchange store
- Failed to read message from Exchange store
- Failed to write message to archive database
- Failed to delete message from Exchange store.
Error Retry strategy.
- Each failed email is retried a number of times. After the 2nd failure, an email is issued reporting the fact.
- Each time a retry fails to work, the retry time is doubled. The first retry time is 15 minutes.
- When there are 10* different messages that cannot be processed, the archive task is stopped for 10 minutes and then restarted.
- This cycle will occur up to 4 times in a 1 hour period. If the situation remains unchanged, then the archive service is stopped.
- Restarting the service will reset the retry counters for all classes of error message except the "failed to delete" errors.
* - 50 for the deletion queue strategy.
Error reporting strategy
- Under all retry conditions an event is written to the Application event log.
- Emails are sent at both task and service shutdown.
- Emails are sent on 2nd and subsequent unique message failures.
It is our experience that on average 1 or 2 messages per 100,000 may have a problem, and quite often these also present Outlook with difficulties in reading or interacting with them
Note: It is important to note that when the archive task shows the yellow warning symbol, this only means that the last mail to be processed had a problem. When the task shows the red stopped symbol, then the service is no longer processing messages.
Article ID: 20060825
Last Reviewed: 25th August 2006
Revision: 1.0