I was working on an SBS 2003 server that had e-mails for one user that would not deliver.  They were stuck in the Local Delivery Queue in Exchange 2003 in a retry state.  I tried to force connection, but they would never budge. 

I turned on diagnostic logging to get more information about what was going on in the Event Logs.  What I saw was “EcLocallyDiliverMsg to the store failed.  Error code: -1605, Event ID 327”. 

Some investigating seemed to point to a problem with the user’s mailbox, and that we would need to rebuild the user’s mailbox.  I exported all of the user’s mail to a PST file, deleted the mailbox, recreated the mailbox, and imported the PST file back in.  The mail remained stuck in the Local Delivery Queue.

While rebuilding the mailbox was the first part to resolving the problem, the second part came from a blog at www.thecyberwolfe.com/blog/?p=665.  This person explained that they had to recategorize the mail so that it would get to the new mailbox by doing the following in the registry of the server: [more]

  1. Stop the SMTP service.
  2. Open Regedit and navigate to the following key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SmtpSvc
  3. Create a subkey named “Queuing”
  4. Select Queuing and on right hand pane create new dword value with name “ResetMessageStatus” with value 1 in hexadecimal.
  5. Restart the SMTP service – check the queues and see if mail is being delivered. Also check the account mailbox at this point.
  6. Once all the mails are delivered to that user, stop the SMTP service and change the value for “ResetMessageStatus” to 0 and start the SMTP service.