Resubmit Messages in Queues

There might come a time where you experience a problem with you Hub/Edge Transport servers, Mailbox servers or e-mail gateway and messages are stuck in Queues. Once you resolve the issue, you can either wait a few minutes for Exchange to resubmit the e-mails or you can manually resubmit them to the Submission queue for the categorizer to reprocess as long as they have the following status:

·         Mailbox delivery queues or remote delivery queues that have the status of Retry. The messages in the queues must not be in the Suspended state;

·         Messages in the Unreachable queue that aren't in the Suspended state;

·         Messages in the poison message queue.

 

 

To manually resubmit messages, you can use the following methods (examples below):

·         Use the Retry-Queue cmdlet with the -Resubmit parameter;

·         Export the messages to .eml message files and resubmit them by placing them in the Replay directory;

·         Use Queue Viewer or the Resume-Message cmdlet to resubmit the messages in the poison message queue. You can’t use the Retry-Queue with the -Resubmit parameter cmdlet to resubmit messages in the Poison Queues.

 

 

By using the –Resubmit parameter, messages are forced to be resubmitted through the Categorizer for a new delivery attempt. If you do not use the –Resubmit parameter, the delivery queue will try to connect to the next hop immediately without resubmitting the messages through the Categorizer.

 

 

Let’s look at a few examples:

1. To export a copy of a message (so you can put it into the Replay directory) that has an InternalMessageID of 1234 that's located in the remote delivery queue for the domain MSExchange.org on the server HUB01 to the path C:\MSExchange Export\export.eml:

Export-Message HUB01\MSExchange.org\1234 -Path “C:\MSExchange Export\export.eml”

2. To resubmit all the messages in the 62306 delivery queue of the HUB01 server, use the following cmdlet (you can’t use the EMC):

Retry-Queue “HUB01\62306” -Resubmit $True

3. To resubmit all the messages in all delivery queues of server HUB01 that have a status of Retry (again, you can’t use the EMC):

Retry-Queue –Server “HUB01” -Filter {Status -eq "Retry"} -Resubmit $True

4. To resubmit all messages located in the Unreachable queue of server HUB01, use the following cmdlet (again, you can’t use the EMC):

Retry-Queue “HUB01\Unreachable” -Resubmit $True

5. Let’s force a connection attempt for all queues that are holding messages for the domain msexhange.org, have a status of Retry and are located on the server HUB01:

Retry-Queue –Server “HUB01” -Filter {NextHopDomain -eq “msexchange.org” -and Status -eq “Retry”}

 

6. To resubmit messages in the Poison Queues, you have to resume the messages. As I mentioned previously, the Poison Queue cannot be resubmitted by using the Retry-Queue cmdlet with the -Resubmit parameter.

Remember that the Poison Queue contains messages that are determined to be harmful to the Exchange system after a server failure. They may also be victims of a poorly written agent that crashed the Exchange server while it was processing them. If you're unsure of the safety of the messages in the poison message queue, you should export them to files so you can examine them.

 

Using the Exchange Management Console to resume messages in the Poison Queue:

1.       In the EMC click Toolbox;

2.       Open the Queue Viewer tool;

3.       In Queue Viewer, click the Queues tab;

4.       Click the Poison Queue and select View Messages;

5.       Select one or more messages from the list, right-click them and select Resume.

 

To use the Shell you must first determine the identity of the message to be resumed. This example will show the identity of all messages in the poison queue:

Get-Message -Queue “Poison” | Select Identity

 

Now you can use the identity to resume the message. For example, let’s resume the message with an identity value of 123:

Resume-Message 123