Emails stuck in the Inbound queue with the following error: 421 4.7.7 [internal] Unable to process message at this time

Products

• Messaging Gateway

Issue/Introduction

When querying the Message Queues page of the Control Center web interface, some messages are queued in the Inbound queue with the error: 421 4.7.7 [internal] Unable to process message at this time.

Querying the message queues from the command line via the mta-control command to query queue also shows the same issue. On further review of the mail log, there are errors stating “Deferring message: failed to filter message” .

Environment

Messaging Gateway

Cause

This error message can be caused by a number of underlying conditions which are preventing the Brightmail Engine from scanning messages including:

• There are insufficient disk or memory resources available to the SMG scanner.
• SMG is configured with LDAP based policy groups and connectivity to the LDAP source has failed or there is another issue specific to the LDAP source.
• The Brightmail Engine service is stopped.
• The Brightmail Engine is unable to reload the malware filtering engine following an update.

Resolution

From SMG Status > Hosts, verify that all host resources are in a green (healthy) state. The most direct means of resolving this issue is to reboot the appliance or virtual machine as this will free all allocated resources and restart all services.

If this fails to resolve the issue, please review the logs for the following services for errors:

• The Directory Data Service
• The Brightmail Engine

If either of these services are generating errors, searching the Broadcom knowledge base for those errors should provide specific guidance on how to resolve the underlying issue.