so our exchange server took a total crap and after spending the weekend retrieving mailboxes off of damaged drives i asked my boss to rebuild the server so i can actually take a break. so he did and he set up the pop3 connector in SBS 2003 so it can retrieve from our firewall new emails. the problem was he didnt set up the stmp domain in the recipient policy to handle accounts from "@company.com" it was still the default "@company.local" from when he created the domain for it. I came in this morning and people were still complaining they had no new email I checked and added "@company.com" to the policy so now new email from the outside is coming in but I cant find the old email that was being held by the firewall over the weekend. I checked the standard 'failed mail' folders in sbs 2003 and nothing is there, nothing in the pick up folder either. did these emails just disappear or is there a place where exchange stores emails its "not responsible for?"
My guess is that DD is right. But you should check your queues to see if you've got messages in there waiting to be delivered. They might also be in your bad mail folder.
they didnt bounce the way our mail is set up is that the outside mail is sent and held in our firewall which has a pop3 service built in. the email is scanned for viruses etc and then pulled down via a pop3 connector to our exchange server. when our exchange went down the emails were just being held on the firewall...then the pop3 was activated and it pulled the emails down but did not deliver them to their respective mailboxes because at the time exchange was not responsible for the "@company.com" domain... there isnt anything in the failed mail box either that was the first thing i checked. thanks
i really have nothing to add to help you in your current situation. I will say this go virtual. My exchange server is running on a vm. If my san goes down. ( which is actually where the email vm is stored) I all i have to do is boot up a off site copy of the email vm and Im back in business. Also get a off site email spooling service. we have a barruacda on site that srubs the email for viruses and spam but we use a off site spooling service to bag the mail incase the server goes down. This way the mail does not get delivered to the server is completely up. we use xen server as our virtual server platform because the cost of entry is so low. but Vm ware is good too but it does cost more to get the same features.