[JLEIGHTON]

I'm running BES 4.1.5 on Windows Server 2003 SP2 in an Exchange 2003 environment. We have been running the system since first quarter of last year roughly, and never had any issues with it. All of a sudden, when I go to activate a device, it just hangs on "Activating ...".

To make a long story short, I found out that the activation email never made it to the user's inbox. After searching our spam filter, it turns out that the email never even made it to our network. I ran the BBSRPTEST utility and it passed, all other normal BES functionality is working, users are sending/receiving email just fine, but I can't activate ANY new users. I looked through both the Windows application log as well as the BES specific logs under c:\program files\research in motion\blackberry enterprise server\logs, and found nothing that made reference to contacting the RIM servers to initiate the user activation.

I disabled all Symantec Endpoint services running on the machine to make sure that was not denying the outbound connection from the server, but no luck. I even went as far as to uninstall SEP temporarily since this was a recent install and I suspected it may be interfering.

Also, just to verify my understanding of the activation process is accurate and I'm at least following the right troubleshooting steps, this is the order as I understand it:

1. BES admin generates the activation password from the server.
2. BES contacts the RIM network with the password and email information.
3. RIM servers send activation email with EPT.DAT attachment to email address of the user.
4. Email is delivered to user's inbox.
5. Enterprise Activation is initiated from the device with email address and password.
6. BES checks the email address and password against the EPT.DAT file in the user's inbox via MAPI connection to Exchange.
7. Assuming the information matches up, it starts to push the service books, etc. and finishes activating the device.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Josh