Exchange servers not talking to each other

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Strange one this. One of my clients cannot receive email from another company they do business with on a regular basis. My SBS box is spitting the emails back with the following message...

This message was rejected due to the current administrative policy by the destination server. Please retry at a later time. If that fails, contact your system administrator.

I don’t have any spam filtering or major lockdown on the Exchange config and email is only rejected from this one business for some reason.

So I phone the company which has problems sending to my client only to find out that their IT guy has legged it (supposedly he got a better job and just walked out) so one of the guys onsite has given me remote access to the server so I could have a look (that was nice of him!).

Anyways I can telnet each way from both servers by I.P and mail.companyname.com on port 25 so I’m not sure why the emails are being bounced. Email is being routed with DNS, no smarthosts or POP3 connectors.

The bounce back email is bizarre; does anyone know which part of the ‘administrative policy’ on Exchange is rejecting the emails?

 

My server is SBS 2003 and the other one is SBS 2000. I looked on the 2K server today, no blacklists or anything like that.

Bizarrely both clients are in the same building (on separate VLANS) so there are a few other factors to consider.

Basically the 2k3 SBS cant receive from the 2k SBS, hmmmm :hhhmmm

 

Update: managed to fix this problem but what it took a while!

Ok, so both of these companies are in the same building which has a VLAN for each office and this is all patched into some Cisco kit which I couldn’t get access to.

There is around 20 businesses in the building and while I was onsite a few guys from various companies said they couldn’t email other companies in the building or access their internal websites.

I managed to get access to the DNS server and it was in a bad way so I ended up putting in a new DNS server which now resolves MX and WWW A records to the internal VLAN I.Ps of each clients server and now everything works! There was also another issue with the original clients exchange server trying to send outbound email as servername.domain.local and this was getting rejected from other Exchange servers as obviously it should have been domain.com or whatever.

I spent three days onsite, made some money, and now I am supporting the Windows infrastructure as of next week, result!!

 

Cheers guys, a small problem ended up being a big problem! It was good to pick up some new business and one of my workmates has taken over the support of the Cisco kit so more good news there.

From what I have heard the previous IT guy was having a few problems with the network over the past couple of months and ended up leaving. Not entirely sure what the circumstances were but these things happen.