Connection closed gracefully error when sending bulk or large quantity of e-mails in an Exchange 2007/2010 environment

I was recently helping out an old work colleague who were having issues with their CRM software and sending bulk emails through their Exchange 2010 server. After around ten minutes they would receive an error message with connection closed gracefully.  They would then have to restart their mail out and need to monitor it for this issue to ensure it didn’t get stuck every ten minutes with this error.

After poking around their receive connectors on their hub transport server I noticed that the particular connector (for their internal applications) they were using had a connection time out of 10 minutes, which would result in us receiving the connection closed gracefully error from our end user application.  The fix for this is to simply increase the ConnectionTimeout value for our Recieve Connector to anything reasonable, for us it is 3 hours. We would do by issuing the following Exchange PowerShell command:

Set-ReceiveConnector "Internal Connector - Synergetic" -ConnectionTimeout 03:00:00 -ConnectionInactivityTimeout 01:00:00

You will want to make sure that your receive connector is protected (i.e. is only set to allow internal networks) as this basically allows anything to stay connected for up to 3 hours so it could be abused.

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