Transport Service does not start after installing CodeTwo Exchange Rules family software

This article is obsolete and may relate only to older versions of our software.

Problem:

You have just installed CodeTwo Exchange Rules family software and your MS Exchange Transport Service fails to start.

Solution:

The situation in which the MS Exchange Transport Service stops as a result of our software installation is extremely rare and is always caused by one of the following reasons:

• You have installed CodeTwo Exchange Rules 2013 or PRO on MS Exchange Server 2013 with Service Pack 1 (SP1/CU4). Applying MS fix for Exchange or upgrading to CU5 or newer prior to CodeTwo software installation is required. Click here to find out what to do to use CodeTwo software with MS Exchange 2013 SP1.
• An old version of the software was installed that does not support current version of Windows or Exchange service pack(s) or update rollup(s) - Always make sure that you are installing the newest version available on the product's website.
• A version of the software that is incompatible with your MS Exchange Server was installed - You need to install a specific version of CodeTwo Exchange Rules for a particular version of MS Exchange Server. Also, CodeTwo Exchange Rules PRO has two installer files available: one for MS Exchange 2013 and the other one for MS Exchange 2007/2010.
• The software was installed on a server with wrong role - CodeTwo Exchange Rules family software must be installed on MS Exchange Server 2013 Mailbox (MBX) role (not CAS!) or Hub Transport role in the case of MS Exchange Server 2007 or 2010.
• Poor performance of the server – CodeTwo software does not have specific hardware requirements, however, insufficient RAM amount may cause MS Exchange Transport Service fail to start. If you are running CodeTwo software on a virtual machine it will be easy to try out starting the machine with more RAM assigned to it, for example if you previously had 8GB RAM assigned please expand it to 10GB, etc.
• There is Transport agents order conflict – please experiment with the order of agents on the list of MS Exchange Transport Service agents. Usually our software works the best if our agent is the last on the list but sometimes it may be better if it is moved to the top of it. See this article on how to change the order of the agents.
• There is other kind of Transport agents conflict – sometimes there is some kind of conflict between agents of Transport Service. To exclude this scenario we recommend to disable all other agents leaving only our agent enabled and trying to start the service. If the service starts try enabling other agents and see at which point the service fails to start to identify the conflict. On Microsoft's websites you can find out how to disable or enable Transport agent.
• Installation of the software is corrupted – remove the program completely and install from scratch.
• You have customized, limited permissions for the account under which you installed the software. Please try installing the program while logged in as a domain admin user with all administrative privileges, preferably use built-in administrator account.
• If you already configured any rules in our software please consider backuping those and trying to start the service upon removal of all rules to exclude wrong rules design or rules files corruption as source of the problem.

If none of the solutions above helps, get the diagnostic files by following this article and then use our file upload form to send the files and environment description to CodeTwo.

See also:

• How to extend the timeout for services if they do fail to start
• Invalid agent assembly path error
• CodeTwo and Exchange 2013 SP1