Microsoft Exchange Server - FIPS-FS Error 0x800706BE, 0x80010105

We started encountering this issue on our on-prem (Hybrid) exchange server all of a sudden which was preventing emails from being scanned by the anti malware module, and hence were being held in the submission queue and not being delivered.

You may see errors in the event log such as;

The FIP-FS Scan Process failed initialization. Error: 0x80010105. Error Details: The server threw an exception.

The FIP-FS Scan Process failed initialization. Error: 0x800706BE. Error Details: The remote procedure call failed.

Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: APPCRASH
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0
Problem signature:
P1: scanningprocess.exe

The usual server and service restarts did not fix the problem.

The issue appears to be related to updates not being installed correctly for the exchange anti malware scanning module.

You can check/confirm this by running these commands from Powershell;

Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Forefront.Filtering.Management.Powershell

Get-EngineUpdateInformation

We got a response like below - note the "UpdateAttemptFailed" status

You can also check the update engine settings by running the command

get-engineupdatecommonsettings

Note the PrimaryUpdatePath - when we attempted to access this URL we were getting a 404 error - this is potentially what the problem is?

Update 4/1/22

I found the following article from the Exchange Team Blog that references this issue and provides a script to fix it

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/email-stuck-in-exchange-on-premises-transport-queues/ba-p/3049447/page/2

Before implementing the provided fix, I can ran the default script to Enable-AntimalwareScanning (located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Scripts) - mail delivery operated for a brief period of time before mails began queuing again.

I ran the script provided in the blogpost, and even after a full server restart, the problem still persists so I have disabled the antimalware scanning again

Fix/Solution/Workaround

Disable the anti-malware scanning option. This is easily done by running the included powershell script in your Exchange installation directory

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Scripts\Disable-AntimalwareScanning.ps1

Run the script then restart the Microsoft Exchange Transport Service

Once we did this the submission queue immediately started clearing.

You can reverse the change easily by running the Enable-AntimalwareScanning.ps1 script in the same folder later on.

We've also found this recent MS article outlining steps to manually update the scan engines used by Exchange Server, but we found it still failed to update the signatures after running it

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/troubleshoot/setup/manually-update-scan-engines

iPhone/iPad - Cannot send mail. A copy has been placed in your Outbox. The recipient was rejected by the server

Occasionally I've seen users experience an issue where they can no longer send emails to anyone from their iPad or iPhone, they get the below error message;

"Cannot send mail. A copy has been placed in your Outbox. The recipient %name% was rejected by the server"

The issue is usually caused by the authentication (ie. username and password) failing for the email account, because it is either missing or incorrect.

I've often seen this happen after iOS updates, as passwords for email accounts aren't always preserved during the update process. As a result, the password appears to be present (when you check the settings), but actually isn't, and therefore emails won't send any longer.

To fix the issue, do the following on the problematic device(s);

• Go to Settings
• Go to Mail
  
  
• Select Accounts
  
  
• Select the account that you are having problems sending from
  
  
• Select the account again (first option at top of screen)
  
  
• Update the Domain, Username and Password fields. Even if the password appears to be in there (represented by black circles), delete whatever is in there and re-type the password
  
  
• Click Done from the top right corner. Settings should now be checked and you should get a list of ticks down the ride side of the page

If the settings saved successfully you can try sending emails again, it should now work correctly.

Querying Exchange Mailboxes with Powershell Pt 2

In my previous blog post, I outlined some methods to query Exchange mailboxes using the get-mailbox cmdlet. Whilst the information obtained using this cmdlet is very useful, it does not contain all the information that is available for an Exchange mailbox.

There is another cmdlet available called Get-MailboxStatistics. It is used/applied in the same way as the Get-Mailbox cmdlet, but contains different fields or properties, and therefore, different information relating to the mailbox.

If you run the command Get-MailboxStatistics -identity "MailboxName" | fl it will display the mailbox statistics for that particular mailbox.

This information includes;

• Associated item count (ie. number of items within the mailbox)
• Deleted item count
• Last logon/logoff time
• Total size of items
• Total size of deleted items

So, for a practical example that you could potentially use to query this information. Let's say you want to query all your mailboxes to identify those that have more than 20,000 items within them. You could run the following command;

Get-Mailboxstatistics | Where {$_.ItemCount -gt "20000"} | Select DisplayName

You could replace $_.ItemCount with any of the other properties that are contained within the Get-MailboxStatistics cmdlet.

If you want the query to return more than just the DisplayName field for objects that match your query, you can add them after DisplayName and separate them with a comma (,), or if you want to return all properties then remove | Select DisplayName altogether.

You can also add | Export-CSV-path "C:\Export.csv" -notype to the end to export your query results to a .csv file.

Querying Exchange Mailboxes with Powershell

Exchange and Powershell go hand in hand - as it is essentially what Exchange is built on top of, and is what the Exchange Management Console (EMC) uses to execute commands you choose through the GUI. (Ever noticed you get the Powershell command line equivalent for commands you execute in EMC?)

One of the most common things an administrator will need to do is query all the mailboxes within the system for certain criteria, which I will explain and breakdown in this blog entry.

The command Get-Mailbox is one of the most useful and powerful commands you can use (for information gethering). It can be used to retrieve all the properties for all the mailboxes in your system, or can be tweaked to only return some of the properties for some of the mailboxes within your system.

If you execute the command Get-Mailbox on its own, you will probably be flooded with 1000 responses, followed by the following warning message;


WARNING: By default only the first 1000 items are returned. To change the number of items returned, specify the parameter "-ResultSize". To return all items specify "-ResultSize Unlimited" (Note: Returning all items may take a 
very long time and consume a large amount of memory depending on the actual number of items). It is not recommended to store the results in a variable; instead pipe the results to another task or script to perform batch changes

As per the message, the command on its own will only return the first 1000 results. You can change this by adding -ResultSize Unlimited to it, so it would look like this;

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited

If you run this command it will run through and display the first few properties for every mailbox within your system. While this can be useful, the command can be further tweaked to run faster and provide more accurate/informative results.

To get all the properties for a single users mailbox, you can use the following command

Get-Mailbox -Identity "Morrissey, Peter"

You can replace what is between the " " with any identifier for the mailbox - such as Primary SMTP Address, Display Name or Alias.

When you run this command it will only display the first few properties as it is presenting the information in a table format. If you change the command to display in list format (by adding | fl), you get MUCH more information:

Get-Mailbox -Identity "Morrissey, Peter" | fl

Now you can view ALL the properties for an individual users mailbox. These properties apply to every mailbox within the system, so you can once again, modify the Get-Mailbox command to search on any of the properties you see in this list.

For example, if I wanted to query all the mailboxes within my system, and only return those whose 'Name' property contain the text "Peter", I would run the following command

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Where {$_.Name -like "*Peter*"}

You still need to include -Resultsize Unlimited because although you aren't expecting more than 1000 results to be returned, you do want the Get-Mailbox command to query more than the first 1000 mailboxes, which it will not do if this omitted.

You can replace the $_.Name with any of the other properties for a mailbox - it just needs to have the $_. before it.

The -like operator can also be changed to use -eq (equal to) -ne (not equal to) -gt (greater than) -lt (less than) -le (less than or equal to) -ge (greater than or equal to)

Next you can fine tune the properties that you wish to display for each object whos name contains "Peter". Say you want to only display the DisplayName, Alias, Database and PrimarySMTPAddress properties for each of the results. You could use the following line

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Where {$_.Name -like "*Peter*"} | Select DisplayName, Alias, Database, PrimarySMTPAddress

The benefit of doing this is that by retrieving fewer properties for each object, it speeds up the time it takes for the query to run. It also makes looking through the results much faster as you aren't reading over information you don't need. Once again, you can replace the properties I used with any of the properties available for each mailbox, as we discovered earlier.

Finally, you  can export the results of your query to a CSV file

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Where {$_.Name -like "*Peter*"} | Select DisplayName, Alias, Database, PrimarySMTPAddress | Export-CSV -path "C:\Export.csv" -notype

Once you have the information in a CSV file you can attach it to an email and send it to yourself (or someone else) as per my previous blog post

Exporting Exchange Distribution Group Members with Powershell

Before making any major changes to distribution groups, I like to take a backup of the current membership lists prior to making any changes. Particularly in cases where membership lists are quite large, it's always better to be safe than sorry for when a user or distribution group owner wants to know who was a member prior to making the change.

Getting the list of members and exporting it to a simple .csv file can be achieved using the Powershell script below.

Note that you should change the first two (2) variables ($DLName and $ExportFilePath) accordingly.

#Script to get/export list of all distribution group members
#Date Created: 24th January, 2013
#Author: Peter Morrissey


#Enable Exchange cmdlets
add-pssnapin *exchange* -erroraction SilentlyContinue

$DLName = "DL_Example_List"
$ExportFilePath = "C:\Export\Export.csv"


$MemberList = get-distributiongroupmember -identity $DLName

ForEach ($Member in $MemberList){write-output "$($member.name)" | out-file -filepath "$exportfilepath" -append -noClobber}