SBS 2008 Fax Routing to Email Fails with "The following error occurred: 0x80040211"

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Rod White]

Customers are currently seeing issues where SBS 2008 servers receives faxes successfully, but intermittently faxes routed to email may fail. You may also notice that the Fax Server Services crashes (fxssvc) due to a CDO call. If you look within Fax and Scan Console the Incoming queue folder may show that faxes are in a retry or failed state.

In normal troubleshooting you would enable protocol logging for the "Windows SBS Fax SharePoint Receive Connector" within Exchange Management Console and wait for the failure to occur.  However, this time logging shows nothing.   The reason for this is that the faxes are failing before the connection to Exchange 2007 so nothing is logged.

At the time of the Errors the fax server will continue to route to Folders, Printers, and SharePoint. Faxes are also routed to the Archive folder on the server. Note that customers are not losing faxes, just the notification through email fails.

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft Fax
Event ID: 32083
Task Category: Inbound
Level: Error
Description:
Unable to route fax C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows NT\MSFax\Queue\1C9BEB28C4E2F.tif to the requested e-mail address.
The following error occurred: 0x80040211
This error code indicates the cause of the error.
Check the SMTP server configuration, and correct any anomalies.

0x80040211 translates to CDO_E_SMTP_SEND_FAILED

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft Fax
Event ID: 32089
Task Category: Inbound
Level: Error
Description:
The Fax Service failed to execute a specific routing method. The service will retry to route the fax according to the retries configuration. If the retries fail, verify routing method configuration.
Job ID: 0x0401c9beb28c4e2f.
Received on Device: 'Courier V.Everything EXT PnP (V90-x2)'
Received file name: 'C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows NT\MSFax\Queue\1C9BEB28C4E2F.tif'.
Routing extension name: 'Microsoft Routing Extension'
Routing method name: 'Route through e-mail'

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft Fax
Event ID: 32078
Task Category: Inbound
Level: Error
Description:
A successfully received fax was not routed automatically. You can find the fax in the Inbox/Incoming archive folder by its Job ID. Job ID: 0x0401c9be065c1fd1. Received on Device: 'Courier V.Everything EXT PnP (V90-x2)'

Resolution (Update 8/10/09)

You can now install an update for your SBS 2008 server to correct the issue described in this post. At this time, the knowledge base article is still being written but you can request the fix directly from here:

https://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=973640&kbln=en-us

Make sure to click "Show hotfixes for all platforms and languages" to download the x64 version.  It is normal that the product shows Windows Vista and not Windows 2008 or SBS 2008.

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As previously discussed, an easy way of determining if you have the issue that is corrected by this Hotfix is by restarting the Fax Service on the affecter server, if after doing so, email routing works for a while and then stops again, then this is most likely the same issue this fix is designed to address. On the other hand, if routing always fail, then the problem will most likely persists even after this fix requirement further troubleshooting to isolate the point of failure.

Update (4/11/2011)

This issue can also affect Windows 2008 R2 and SBS 2011 Standard.  The above link will take you to the hotfix for both versions.  For more information, see https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;973640

Previous Resolution

We are currently tracking this issue, but are unable to provide a solution at this time. If you experience the symptoms in this article, please contact Microsoft Support at 1.800.936.4900. As always, if the issue is determined to be a bug, there is no charge for the support incident. To verify that you have the issue we are currently investigating, try restarting the Fax service. If email routing starts working (for awhile, not a permanent fix) you probably have the issue under investigation.