I’ve been meaning to start posting, for a while now, errors that I encounter either here at work or at home that require some kind of investigation and then publish the answer, if any, that I find. Today’s entry comes from work. Hours after having resolved a phone outage our e-mail (clients using Outlook 2003 connecting to Exchange Server 2003) just STOPS working out of nowhere. No updates applied, no reboots – it just stopped working.
Clients who were NOT operating in Cached Exchange Mode would receive this error when trying to open Outlook:
“Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Unable to open the Outlook Window. The set of folders could not be opened.”
Users that WERE operating with Cached Exchange Mode would still see their messages but were not able to either send or receive messages. Messages sent were returned immediately with this message:
Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.
Subject: test
Sent: 12/1/2005 12:49 PMThe following recipient(s) could not be reached:
‘##########@#####.com’ on 12/1/2005 12:49 PM
This message could not be sent. Try sending the message again later, or contact your network administrator. The Microsoft Exchange server is currently busy. If this message is still displayed in 30 minutes, contact your Exchange server administrator. Error is [0x80040111-0x80040111-0x000520].
After an hour of Googling (and coming across thread after thread with problems posted but no solution – please people, learn to come back and tell others what was wrong!) I eventually discovered (thanks to a helpful tech at Access Systems) that two services on the Windows Server that were scheduled to start automatically had suddenly stopped working: “Microsoft Exchange Information Store” and “Microsoft Exchange System Attendant.” Once I restarted these two services which took only about 30 seconds, tops, everything was working fine again – no reboot required.
Anyways, I hope someone is able to find this information useful.
UPDATE: Although this was a temporary solution…it turned out that we had actually reached our mailbox store limit of 16 gigabytes. It turns out that Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2003 eliminates this particular limitation but an update at this time was not an option. So, my only option was to temporarily stop the Simple Mail Transfer Porotocol (SMTP) service on the Exchange server and then archive some of the largest-sized mailboxes. This brought us down below the 16gig limit until we were able to apply that SP2 patch. You gotta love those Microsoft folks…always thinking ahead.
You just saved my ass. I knew about this limitation, adn could have sworn I installed this service pacl. I would have never checked this unledd I came across your blog. I’ll have to hold any more thanks until I actually install the service pack tonight, but we’ll see. Thanks.
Chris
Hey, glad to hear this *might* have solved your problem. Hopefully so. Be sure and post back as to whether or not it worked out – or if you found a different solution. This particular post gets hit quite a few times per month so I’m sure our users would love to hear back from you! Best of luck!
It worked out, but not until I re-ran the best practices scan again and it told me I had to create a few registry entries in order to raise the limit of the size of the database. Here was the link to the TechNet article:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/Analyzer/b74e59e4-3386-45e3-a656-48aab72bbe59.mspx?mfr=true