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Anti-Spam Enhancements in Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2

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Topic Last Modified: 2006-04-05

In the business world, a reliable, effective, and robust e-mail system is one of the keys to success. Keeping your e-mail system healthy and efficient is essential to business health, but in recent years, as the volume of unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE), or spam, has exploded, this task has become increasingly difficult for IT professionals.

The Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative, announced by Microsoft® in 2004, clearly outlines a roadmap and technology infrastructure to help reduce the volume of spam.

We should differentiate between alleviating the spam problem and completely eliminating it. Eliminating spam completely will take a long time. In the meantime, we must be ready for an extended coexistence of spam and legitimate mail, and work to reduce spam and its impact.

In this article, I describe the message hygiene and anti-spam enhancements provided in Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2). In this article, the term message hygiene refers collectively to the Exchange Server 2003 SP2 features deployed throughout the messaging environment to help combat spam.

What’s New with Anti-Spam Features with SP2?
Exchange Server 2003 SP2 represents an important step toward alleviating the spam epidemic. Let’s look at what it provides.

Sender ID Exchange Server 2003 SP2 delivers the long-awaited Sender ID filtering technology, which primarily targets forgery of e-mail addresses. The elimination of spoofed mail will immediately cause a significant reduction of mail traffic into the Exchange organization. Preliminary data from the internal IT department at Microsoft shows that enabling the Sender ID filter allowed Microsoft to achieve an approximately 10 percent net increase in spam capture before mail is transmitted to Exchange Intelligent Message Filter for additional anti-spam processing. Stopping spoofed mail at the gateway is important because the reduction of mail traffic into the Exchange organization reduces bandwidth consumption and eliminates the overhead of processing these messages in the internal mail infrastructure.

Intelligent Message Filter A second important addition to the existing Exchange Server 2003 anti-spam features is the inclusion of Microsoft SmartScreen™ technology in the form of Intelligent Message Filter. Previously, Intelligent Message Filter was available as an add-in tool only. Now Intelligent Message Filter is an important part of Exchange Server 2003. Intelligent Message Filter contains updated spam characteristics that improve its ability to block spam. And on top of that, Intelligent Message Filter provides anti-phishing protection.

Connection Filtering Behind the Perimeter Connection filtering was introduced in Exchange Server 2003, but it worked from the network perimeter only. Because most servers running Exchange Server 2003 are positioned behind the network perimeter, the Connection filtering functionality was not possible. Exchange Server 2003 SP2 changes all this by enabling deployment of connection filtering not only at the network perimeter, but behind it too. Now you can take full advantage of message hygiene and anti-spam enhancements, regardless of where your Exchange server is deployed.




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