(Being sentenced to) Life with Exchange Server

I recently migrated a company that I do entirely too much IT work for over to Microsoft Exchange Server.

The company without question has had need for Exchange's groupware features. It seems almost silly that they've fumbled through the last five years without as much as shared scheduling.

The gotcha is that SpamButcher doesn't work very well with Exchange, at least not when mailboxes are stored on the server. Now that I actually use this configuration on a daily basis, extra pressure is being put on SpamButcher development to get Exchange support working better.

The short of the problem is that SpamButcher can't tell which messages are new, and which have already been read. This results in SpamButcher processing up to hundreds of different messages that it shouldn't have to. Worse, when blocking spam it marks any messages it processes as having been "read."

For the most part, this is actually a limitation in the POP3 protocol. I'm still optimistic that some creative thinking can make things work at least a little better. Until we get this sorted out, using my own anti-spam software is pretty much off limits.

In the past, I'd always run SpamButcher on my day-job system; if nothing else to provide another test platform. Over time, my "work account" has gotten more and more spam - making SpamButcher a practical necessity. Since I disabled it, I've been getting a lot more spam - enough to where it has been difficult to readily locate email from colleagues against the background of noise.

As a rank amateur at Exchange Server administration, I've been hesitant to enable Exchange's own filtering. For the life of me, I can't figure out what the different Exchange "Intelligent Message Filtering" levels actually mean. I also am honestly not sure how to enable it for just a single account as opposed to the whole company. The last thing I want are fellow employees complaining that I've been making their messages vanish.

However, I've done two things to reduce junk messages to good effect:

Enable Outlook's own filtering in the least-aggressive mode
The Outlook spam filters get rid of about 40% of junk. I set it up to just move the messages to the "Junk Mail" folder - so I can periodically review them. I suspect false-positives can happen - but I haven't seen any in the last week.

Setup exchange server to reject all email from certain countries
This article details how to setup Exchange server to block all messages from various problem countries. I certainly can't make any promises - but so far it seems to be blocking about another 40% of junk and hasn't caused any problems.

While SpamButcher cuts out all but maybe 2% of spam, my current work configuration still lets about 20% through. This reduces the problem to an annoyance as opposed to preventing me from using email effectively altogether.

Back