[Today's tip comes to us from Damian Leibaschoff]

Routing an Inbound Fax to E-Mail fails (Event Id 32083 - 0x80040212). This is a very interesting symptom to an event that at first sight is pretty unrelated to faxing. Most people have started seeing this problem around 1/7/2007. Basically, inbound faxes are not routed to an email recipient.

The application log will show the following error:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Microsoft Fax
Event Category: Inbound
Event ID: 32083
Date: 1/11/2007
Time: 3:19:03 PM
User: N/A
Computer: SERVER
Description:

Unable to route fax E:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application
Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\MSFax\Queue\1C735D6B62BDD.tif to the requested e-mail
address.

The following error occurred: 0x80040212

This issue is caused by a longer than usual timeout after the SMTP “RCPT TO”
command is received by the SMTP server and a response is returned.
This has been seen lately due to the configuration of RBLs (real time block lists),
that include the now defunct ORDB list. This is causing a delay in the response and
triggering the failure.

ORDB Shutting Down Announcement:

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=1950&isc=78341c2e69b06a57f934dc68b30f7069

You must re-configure your Real-Time Block Lists to remove the ORDB entry.
Check under ESM, Global settings, Message Delivery (Properties), Connection
Filtering tab. Remove the ORDB entry if found, then restart the SMTP virtual server and
re-test by receiving a new fax (re-routing of old faxes to e-mail will not work.  This is expected behavior).

Please note that this has also been seen when a third party solution running within SMTP/Exchange is the one doing the RBL check, so if you are running a third party application that is doing spam control and it is checking the RBLs, make sure that the ORDB RBL is no longer in use. If you have any doubts please contact the third party vendor.

Also remember that in the future this can happen again if another RBL provider goes offline temporarily or for good.