Update:  6/25/2013, 2:00 PM EDT:

As a result of the change required to isolate the failing component of our email infrastructure late last week, we have discovered that legitimate undeliverable bounce back messages have not been forwarded on to the original senders at Middlebury.edu and MIIS.edu but rather remained queued up.  We have made the necessary configuration correction and about 300 legitimately undeliverable messages have now been correctly delivered.  You may have received several messages all at once and wondered if there was a problem sending email off-campus generally, there is not, these are legitimate undeliverable bounce messages that have been accumulating for the last several days and now have been correctly forwarded on to you.  Our sincere apologies for the delay in the delivery of these messages.

Update as of 6:30 PM EDT:

Testing and monitoring continues to be positive and we are now very confident that the intermittent Outlook disconnect incident has been resolved.  Thank you for your patience and support during this event.

—

Update as of 2:10 PM EDT:

At this time we believe we have identified and eliminated the component that was causing the intermittent disconnects from outlook clients to our email Exchange environment.  We are monitoring the systems closely and hope that this incident may be behind us.

—

At this time we are experiencing intermittent and isolated disconnects to our email Exchange environment from Outlook clients.  You may have noticed warning messages or other pop-ups from time to time indicating that your Exchange client is attempting to contact Microsoft Exchange.

We are diligently working to solve this issue.  We are isolating each component of our Exchange infrastructure including load balancing appliances that front-end the Exchange infrastructure and eliminating each as the cause of the problem.  This is a time consuming process as it can take several hours to place individual components into maintenance mode and isolate them as client sessions tend to hold on particular servers they are currently working with.

Please note that email messages are flowing and being stored normally.  Additionally there have not be any issues with accessing Exchange via the web interface (Outlook web access available at https://mail.middlebury.edu), so if the disconnection errors or warnings you receive within your Outlook client are too disruptive, please consider using  the web interface until we are able to completely isolate and resolve the issue.

We appreciate your patience and apologies for the inconvenience, we recognize how critical email is to your daily work activity and our full resources are focused on resolving this issue as quickly as possible.

Best regards,

Jim