NDR 4.4.7 – Could not deliver the message in the time limit specified. Please retry or contact your administrator.
2010-08-26 Initial post
This issue happened a few weeks ago and I had to contact MS support because I could not find a solution for it. It turns out that MS has the fix in KB 938650 (A meeting update message or a meeting cancellation message from an Exchange 2003 user is not delivered to an Exchange 2007 user). Although the KB specifically mentions an issue between Exchange Server 2003 and 2007, the description of the issue closely matched my issue.
My issue was between Exchange Server 2003 and IBM Lotus Notes (I'm not sure of the exact version of Notes since it's an external system). The MS tech told me that the KB fix would apply to my case as well, even though he was only able to find a mention of Lotus Domino having this issue. This fix might also apply to other e-mail systems such as Novell GroupWise. I did ask the MS tech to request that the KB be updated to mention that other systems besides Exchanges Server 2007 might have the issue. I would have found the KB on my own if it had "Lotus Notes" mentioned in there.
The issue was that a user was getting NDRs when sending out some meeting-related messages (specifically meeting updates and cancellations). If a meeting invitation was sent to someone externally who was on a Lotus Notes server, and the Lotus Notes person accepted the meeting, any new updates or cancellation to the meeting would result in the message getting stuck in the outbound SMTP queue in Exchange. The meeting update/cancellation never made it to Lotus Notes and the message eventually expired (2 days after the messages was initially queued, in our case, but it could vary depending on the SMTP Virtual Server expiration timeout setting). Exchange then sent an undeliverable message notification like the one below back to the sender:
Could not deliver the message in the time limit specified. Please retry or contact your administrator.
<exchangeserver.domain.com #4.4.7>
The sender would have also received this delay notification after 12 hours (this could vary depending on the SMTP Virtual Server delay notification setting):
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.
Delivery to the following recipients has been delayed.
lotus-notes-user@somedomain.com
To fix this issue, I verified that all the DLL files mentioned in KB 938650 were at the version level mentioned or higher. Note that your server might not have every DLL listed (none of my servers had Rtdsmcal.dll). Since all the DLLs on my servers met the minimum version levels, I didn't need to install the hotfix in the KB and only needed to make the registry change.
The KB doesn't mention that the registry change alone requires a restart of any services or a server reboot (but the hotfix does restart some services), and the MS tech confirmed that neither was required. It turns out that after I made the change, it didn't fix the issue until after the servers were rebooted. So a reboot or at least a restart of Exchange services is required.
Note that the hotfix/registry change isn't required on every single Exchange server. It's only required on servers that have user mailboxes, bridgehead servers, and any other Exchange server that might handle outbound SMTP traffic. It won't hurt anything to make the changes on all Exchange servers though.
I made two registry update files--one to make the change and one to delete the change (in case the change messes something up). The reg files might actually be included in the Fix it link in the KB, but I didn't bother to look into that and made my own. Below are the files. Just remove _.txt from the file names.
