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A Note on Defer and Fail Event IDs in Exchange 2010 Message Tracking Logs

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So you may have seen DEFER or FAIL eventids in your tracking logs and wondered why they are there.

If we look on our documentation on TechNet here we see-

Event name

Description

DEFER

Message delivery was delayed.

FAIL

Message delivery failed.

Pretty self-explanatory, right?

Now sometimes you may see these eventids even though a message was not deferred/delayed or failed delivery.

Well there is another reason that would cause these events logged.

The first event id we will talk about is the DEFER.

When we run Get-MessageTrackingLog we see a DEFER eventid with a source of AGENT below.

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Expanded below we see the SourceContext is Transport Rule Agent

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So let’s go look at our transport rules-

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Here we see we have a transport rule that adds a recipient to the TO: field.

Now when we have a transport rule that adds or removes a recipient from a message header we will log a DEFER eventid in message tracking logs. This is known as a “zero defer” since the message is not really deferred but just pushed back to the submission stage of categorization so we can re-resolve the new recipient. In other words the event is more “cosmetic” since there is no delay we just need to re-categorize the message in the transport pipeline with the new recipient added/removed.

As we can see below the message was not deferred at all-

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Now what about FAIL eventid?

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As we can see in the above message tracking log we log a FAIL eventid from SourceContext Transport Rule Agent. So let’s go back to our rules and see what they are doing-

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Here we have a redirect rule. Now as opposed to adding/removing recipients a redirect rule silently drops the original recipient and redirects a message to the added recipient. This will cause us to log a FAIL eventid since we actually failed in delivering to the original recipient (due to redirection) and a DEFER since we are adding a new recipient and putting the message back to the submission portion of the transport pipeline.

 

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As we can see the message was successfully delivered.

Hope this helped clear up some confusion on these two eventids.

Until next time.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 26, 2013
    Is it applicable to exchange 2007 sp3