Lessons Learned

My earlier post on the outbound mail woes I’ve had was delayed a couple of hours because I had to completely rebuild my blog site. Completely. Reinstalling the blog software and everything. Fortunately, Movable Type has a nice little import/export feature that I was able to use to back up (export) my blog contents to a text file before I blew away the installation and started over. And, after I got Movable Type reinstalled and reconfigured, I was able to restore (import) my blog posts in one step and it was as if the site never had a hiccup.

But it got me to thinking about my web space provider and what type of backups they provide for the site. In this case, since this is dynamic content generated by Movable Type and not by Dreamweaver, I don’t have a local set of files I could re-upload in case of server drive failure. so I’m off to explore the backup/restore options my web host provides should there be a catastrophic error someday. In the meantime, I’m doing an export of my blog contents before every blog post for the time being, just to make sure.

Today, I was the victim. Yesterday, my wife told me that she had sent me an e-mail. I didn’t get it. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because we were getting ready to build yet another fence in the yard. this morning, however, she let me know that she got several “mail delivery delay notifications” including one for the mail she sent me. Here’s how the troubleshooting process went.
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Although it seems to happen more frequently with a new system build, it can happen at any time. Your Exchange server, whether part of an SBS install or not, suddenly stops delivering e-mail. Inbound mail is coming through fine, but users report that their mail is not getting delivered to people outside the organization, and if you look in Exchange System Manager, you see outbound mail stacking up in one or more queues.

Here are some basic, simple steps to help determine where the problem might lie.
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