High latency for receiving e-mails (after a fresh Exchange installation)

Question

Hello,

I have set up a new Exchange Server 2016. The internal email traffic works without any problems. The same holds for sending external emails. However, receiving external emails takes extremely long - with a latency of several hours. The tests refer to OWA (without Outlook client).
MessageTrackingLog indicates a "HAREDIRECTFAIL". That means a shadow message could not be created. According to the HAREDIRECTFAIL's source-context field there are "No suitable shadow servers". Could this be the reason for the latency? If so how can I solve the problem? Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Hi @Exchange-Admin ,

According to the HAREDIRECTFAIL's source-context field there are "No suitable shadow servers". Could this be the reason for the latency?

As I know, the HAREDIRECTFAIL event might not be the key of your high latency issue. The HAREDIRECTFAIL event is expected with one server and can be ignored. It is used for shadow copies and you can disable if you want: Shadow redundancy is enabled by default.

In order to conduct further research about your issue, please try the suggestions below to provide more detailed information about your issue:
1.Does this high latency issue only happen to specific user receiving emails from specific external users? If possible, it is suggested for you to try the same tests with other different users and see if the issue has any difference.
2.Check your Message Tracking Log and make them display in the order of timestamp to see if there is any step at which step it took a long time to delay. For example, like below:

Get-MessageTrackingLog -Start "10:00:00 6/7/2021" | where{$_.MessageSubject -eq "test"} | Sort-Object @{Expression="Timestamp";Descending=$false}

3.Information of message header can also help us to analyze this issue. So, please try to open one of the problematic messages and get its message header via “view message details” option in OWA, analyze the message header you got with Message Header Analyzer and see if we could get more related information.
4.Delays of receiving emails might also occurs if the email message is stuck in the message queue. So, when the issue occurs, you could run the Get-Queue command or check the Queue Viewer to see if the messages are stuck in queues.

5.By the way, do you have any edge transport server or anti-virus programs, interference from them might also cause issues like yours. If you do have, please try to temporarily exit them and see if the issue could be better.

If you have any updates about this issue, please feel free to share with us.