A common problem that administrators might encounter while installing and configuring MS Exchange Server is ‘Exchange is not receiving external emails’ in exchange 2010/2013/2016.
Scenario: In this situation, users are able to send and receive all the mails locally without any problem, but Exchange 2010 server is not receiving emails from the external email addresses and create issues while email is received by the server.
Possible causes: Forced reboot / abrupt shut down / Power down
Solution: In order to resolve this issue, the initial step that probably followed by all administrators is to check the problems occurring with e-mails, which are received. If you are also facing the same issue, check it by sending a test mail from any random external email address to your internal e-mail address. Now go to the EMC (Exchange Management Console), and select Toolbox from the right menu, and click twice on Message Tracking option. You will be able to view a new window, which will prompt you for a login. After completing this login process follow the below mentioned steps
- Search for messages you’ve received from
- Select user
- Enter the address from where the test mail was generated
- Click OK
After receiving the search results, now to get the details double click on the test message. In case the delivery report shows a failed message, follow the next step. Failed mail report looks like:
Go to Start menu and choose services.msc and press enter:
When you will be able to view the Services window, start looking for Microsoft Exchange Transport, and then right-click on this option and choose restart.
After service is restarted repeat the external mail test process and this time it should be fine.
Fix the Exchange 2013 Not Receiving External emails Issue
In case you are using Exchange 2013 server and the same problem occurs while receiving. In such case when you send the mails for testing, then the Microsoft remote connectivity tool will show few errors in incoming SMTP emails. In order to verify the problem you can simply check your server’s incoming SMTP emails status with the help of Microsoft’s remote connectivity analyzer. It will show an error at last, which indicates receiving external email issues on Exchange 2013.
To troubleshoot this problem follow the below mentioned steps:
- Firstly set the local DNS server in external DNS lookups.
- You can find it under ‘servers’ settings and then put the local DNS server IP for external DNS lookups.
- Now restart the MS Exchange transport and Front end transport service.
- Apart from this you can also modify the Host file, this might help you to fix this issue. To do this, open the host file of Exchange 2013 server and enter below mentioned host entries.
10.10.10.100 mailserver
10.10.10.100 mailserver.yourdomain.com
- Most to the times this modification in the host file resolves the problem and restarts the Exchange external transport services.
In case the above mentioned solution doesn’t work for you and you are still facing the same issue, then check (MSRCA) Microsoft remote connectivity analyzer, the transport logs, Firewall logs and Exchange server event viewer. It can provide you hint to fix exchange 2013 not receiving external emails issue.
Hopefully, the above mentioned solutions will help you to resolve the Exchange external email transportation issues in both Exchange 2010 and 2013 versions.
Edited:
If you’re facing external email receiving issue in Exchange Server 2016, I suggest you use Test-Mailflow cmdlets to diagnose the email status sent or delivered to mailbox. This cmdlets tests mail submission, transport, and delivery. It also verifies that each mailbox on server is able to send itself a test message. But this cmdlet is only available in on-premises Exchange Server 2016, it means you can’t use this on Exchange 2013 and 2016. Check here to know more about Test-Mailflow cmdlet.
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