Mail Delivery Time Issue - Exchange 2016

Question

Dear Team,

I am an exchange administrator, currently encountering a weird issue.

I have two users in the same department of my company in finance, both user mailboxes resides on the same database.

Scenario as follows;
A business critical email comes in at 10.43am, user 1 receives the email at 10.43am and user 2 receives it at 4.01pm.

Checked on my firewall, the email came in at the right time, however when checking on exchange delivery log the email was delivered 4.01pm for user 2.
We eliminated the possibility of mail queuing up because they were on the same database, same queue.

Investigating further, i ran the get-messagetrackinglog command to get some in depth details on the mail delivery and noticed something peculiar;

On user 1, on the attribute " SourceContext" notice the client submit time as follows [ T06:43:48.194Z;ClientSubmitTime ]

On user 2, on the attribute " SourceContext" notice the client submit time as follows [ T12:01:23.058Z;ClientSubmitTime ]

It is to my assumption that thats where the issue is, User 1 converting to local time = 10.43am, user 2 converting to local time thats 4.01pm hence the time the emails delivered.

I need to understand how this happened and how can it be resolved.

Your support is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Get the internet headers of the message that was delivered at the later time and post here ( scrubbed of personal data) and lets see where the delay was.

Answer 2

Does the issue only occur to this particular message?
Any clues in the Exchange delievery report?

Agree with @AD-7937 that it's suggested to check the message headers of the problematic message received by user2 for further anayslis. You can use the Message Header Analyzer tool to check the headers.

Answer 3

The delay was your between SPAM Filter and Exchange for User 2:
**ESMTP
**8 MySpamfilter (ip) ExchangeDBServer2 (ip) 7/29/2020 8:01:21 AM
317 minutes 44 seconds****

User 1 had no delay there.

So, you will need to look at why the "SPAM Filter" took so long to send it or if Exchange was backing it off. Check the SPAM Filtering logs there and hopefully it will show why as this does not appear to be an issue wth Exchange itself nececessarily.

If SMTP protocol logging is enabled on the Exchange Receive connector, check there as well and maybe it will show something

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/mail-flow/connectors/configure-protocol-logging?view=exchserver-2019

Answer 4

HI Team,

Thanks for your respective feedbacks, much appreciated.

I have gathered the headers for the respective users. For some reason i cannot upload the txt files here, ive attached the links to the txt files

User 1 - https://textuploader.com/1u7rp

User 2 - https://textuploader.com/1u7r3