Symptom
I recently worked with a customer who had introduced an Exchange 2013 Server into an existing Exchange 2007 environment. The issue was the 2013 Server was unable to send email anywhere; neither externally or to other Exchange Servers. If you executed the below command to view the status of the transport queues you received the below output:
Get-Queue <Queue Identity> | FL
Specifically, the error message you would receive is “4.4.0 DNS query failed. The error was: DNS query failed with error ErrorRetry”
This is a fairly common error indicating there is an issue contacting the DNS Server or Servers that Exchange is configured to use. ReferenceA ReferenceB
Resolution
However, in this case the issue was not obvious, unless you had already seen this issue before or knew a little bit about the health checks Exchange uses to ensure it’s healthy.
I remembered seeing a similar issue on a Reddit thread awhile back, which caused me to search and find this Microsoft KB article titled “DNS query failed” error when an email message is stuck in the Draft folder in an Exchange Server 2013 environment”.
This was the resolution in my scenario as well. To resolve the issue, I simply had to re-check the “Register this connection’s addresses in DNS” option on the IPv4> Properties>Advanced>DNS tab on the primary NIC used for Active Directory communications. While you can uncheck this box on secondary NICs (such as for iSCSI, Replication, Backup, etc.), it should always remain checked on the MAPI/Primary NIC. I’ve also seen issues where having this unchecked on a 2013/2016 DAG node will result in Managed Availability-triggered database failovers.
Troubleshooting Exchange 