Messaging Gateway Alert: Bad message found

Products

• Messaging Gateway

Issue/Introduction

Messaging Gateway has sent an alert message to administrators indicating that one or more messages have been marked as bad and held in the Bad Message queue:

Subject: Bad message found

        The Symantec Messaging Gateway has determined that one or
more email messages are destabilizing the filtering process.
These messages are listed below and have been placed into
the Bad Message queue.
You may view and act on these messages from the command line
with the mta-control bad-msg command set.
Refer to the Symantec Messaging Gateway Administration Guide
for more information about the mta-control command.

Time: Tue, 02 Nov 2024 21:17:10 -0700
Host: smg.example.com
Instance: inbound
Queue-ID: 40/00-16096-5DC02816

In some rare cases, the Brightmail engine used by Messaging Gateway cannot scan a message or attachment due to the construction of the message data. If a message cannot be scanned and interferes with the operation of the scanning engine then Messaging Gateway will place the message in the Bad Message queue for review and to prevent the message from continuing to interfere with SMG operation.

Resolution

• Configuring bad message handling
• Listing messages held in the Bad Message queue
• Exporting bad messages to an SCP server
• Deleting messages from the Bad Message queue
• Releasing a message from the Bad Message queue
• Forwarding a message from the Bad Message queue
• Rescanning a message in the Bad Message queue

Configuring bad message handling

Bad message handling can be configured from the Protocols > SMTP > Settings page although configuration is limited to whether the feature is enabled and the number of attempts SMG will attempt to scan a message before marking at as bad.

1. Go to Protocols > SMTP > Settings
2. Ensure that Enable bad message handling is enabled via the checkbox
3. Set the Number of retries before classifying a message as bad (default 3)
4. Click Save

Listing messages held in the Bad Message queue

1. Log into the SMG scanner command line as admin (using an SSH client like PuTTY, for example)
2. Run mta-control all bad-msg-list

Exporting bad messages to an SCP server

1. Log into the SMG scanner command line as admin (using an SSH client like PuTTY, for example)
2. Run mta-control all bad-msg-list to get a list of bad messages and their queue ids if you do not already have the message queue id
3. Run mta-control all bad-msg-export [queue-id] [url]

Example
mta-control all bad-msg-export 40/00-16096-5DC02816 scp://user@10.20.30.40/tmp/

Deleting messages from the Bad Message queue

1. Log into the SMG scanner command line as admin (using an SSH client like PuTTY, for example)
2. Run mta-control all bad-msg-list to get a list of bad messages and their queue ids if you do not already have the message queue id
3. Run mta-control all bad-msg-delete [queue-id] 

Example
mta-control all bad-msg-delete 40/00-16096-5DC02816

Releasing a message from the Bad Message queue

1. Log into the SMG scanner command line as admin (using an SSH client like PuTTY, for example)
2. Run mta-control all bad-msg-list to get a list of bad messages and their queue ids if you do not already have the message queue id
3. Run mta-control all bad-msg-bypass [queue-id]

Example
mta-control all bad-msg-bypass 40/00-16096-5DC02816

WARNING: Using bypass to release a message from the bad message queue will cause it to be delivered to the original recipient list without spam or malware protection.

Forwarding a message from the Bad Message queue

1. Log into the SMG scanner command line as admin (using an SSH client like PuTTY, for example)
2. Run mta-control all bad-msg-list to get a list of bad messages and their queue ids if you do not already have the message queue id
3. Run mta-control all bad-msg-forward [queue-id] [email address]

Example
mta-control all bad-msg-forward 40/00-16096-5DC02816 [e-mail]

WARNING: Forwarding a message from the bad message queue will cause it to be delivered to the specified address without spam or malware scanning by Messaging Gateway

Rescanning a message in the Bad Message queue

1. Log into the SMG scanner command line as admin via ssh / putty
2. Run mta-control all bad-msg-list to get a list of bad messages and their queue ids if you do not already have the message queue id
3. Run mta-control all bad-msg-retry [queue-id]

Example
mta-control all bad-msg-retry 40/00-16096-5DC02816

 

 

Additional Information

• Configuring bad message handling