Hello Benoit,
Have other seen this behaviour of exchange servers
Yes. One of our MX servers somehow managed to loose the connection to the ldap server (didn't dare to re-establish it) and only returned (valid) tempfail messages.
Sending mails from Exchange (internal messaging system) to this MX server produced the same strage error messages.
Using snoop i could verify that the MX server did NEVER send a 550 error to the exchange server.
and know how to prevent it?
No idea.
The strage thing is this only seams happens occasionaly.
In my case it happened always.
Regards, Adrian