How to View Messages in a Queue

If you experience mail flow problems, it is important to determine whether you have global problems or problems with individual recipients or domains. Viewing the messages in a queue can help you determine this.

Before You Begin

Before you perform the procedure in this topic, read Troubleshooting Mail Flow and SMTP.

The following permissions are required to perform this procedure:

• Member of the local administrators group and a member of a group that has had the Exchange Administrators role applied at the administrative group level

  Right-clicking the individual queues in Queue Viewer provides the following options:

  • Find Messages   Lets you provide search criteria for the messages that you want to inspect.

  • **Freeze   **Stops delivery of all messages that are in the queue. You can use this option to temporarily prevent messages from leaving the queue while you are inspecting the messages. Freezing the queue prevents messages from leaving the queue, but does not prevent messages from entering the queue.

  • **Unfreeze   **Enables the delivery of messages that are in the queue to resume. Unfreezing the queue does not unfreeze individual messages that have been frozen by the administrator.

  • Force Connection   Forces a queue that has a retry state to immediately try to connect.

Procedure

To view messages in a queue

1. Open Exchange System Manager. Expand Administrative Groups, expand <Administrative Group Name>, expand Servers, expand the server on which you want to view queues, and then click Queues.

1. The queues that are located on the selected server are displayed in the results pane. In the results pane, right-click the queue you want to inspect, and then click Find Messages. The Find Messages dialog appears.

2. Optional. Specify the Address Restrictions that will be used to filter the search results. To find all messages from a specific sender, type an SMTP address in the Sender field, or click Sender to select a sender from the Active Directory directory service. To find all messages addressed to a specific recipient, type an SMTP address in the Recipient field, or click Recipient to select a recipient from Active Directory.

3. Optional. Specify the Message Restrictions that will be used to limit the search results. To control how many results are returned, select a value from the Number of messages to be listed in the search drop-down list. The default value is 100. To find only messages that have a particular state, select a value from the Show messages whose state is drop-down list. The default value is to show all messages. You can also select to show only messages that have a frozen or retry state.

4. Click Find Now to display the search results. The messages that match the search criteria are displayed in the Search Results.

5. To view the properties of an individual message, in the results pane, right-click the message you want, and then click Properties. The message's Properties dialog box displays the sender's name, the recipient's name, the message size, and other details about the message.

6. To change the status of an individual message, in the results pane, right-click the message, and select from the following options:

   • **Unfreeze   **Resumes delivery of a previously frozen message.

   • **Freeze   **Suspends delivery of a message.

   • Delete (with NDR)   Deletes the message from the queue and sends an NDR to the sender of the message.

   • Delete (no NDR)   Deletes the message from the queue and does not send an NDR to the sender of the message.