Messaging Gateway

We monitor our SBG 9.0.2 boxes with SNMP.  We are seeing odd behavior in the deferred queues counts.  The SNMP data shows a continously increasing Deferred count reaching into the 2-3 thousands,  Delivery queue remains normal.

GUI  Status / Hosts / Message Queues # are normal as they only report delivery #, not deferred #. Checking the Message Queue does not show large # of messages.

The CLI  command monitor mta_del shows the same high counts.  An mta-control all stop & mta-control all start resets the deferred count, but it starts increasing again.

Not all of our scanners are doing this.

We have an open case, but I'm asking the community if they are experiencing this to see if its widespread.  You'd not notice this if you wern't monitoring with SNMP or using CLI tools to monitor your systems.

Cricket,

     Do you have policies set to defer?

There is a difference between the GUI queue counts, and what monitor mta_del shows.

GUI might say 500 msgs queued, and mta_del shows 2-3,000 in the deferred queue.  The deferred queue will slowly grow over days.  An MTA restart will drop te deferred back to zero, but it just rebuilds over time.  There is no evidence of a queue of this size anywhere in the system.

I have an open case, and they agree it is a reporting error.

BTW: 500 msgs outbound delivery queued is pretty normal for us - ~ 1 million outbound mail/day. Seems a lot of them can't spell their e-mail address (sigh).

There is now a technote on this issue -

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH144320

It is a reporting only issue and only shows up if you are using SNMP or command line tools to monitor status.