Filtering Spam on Microsoft Exchange Mail Server
Exchange Mail Server - How to Filter Spam
By: Jane Y. Whigmore
Increasing threat from spam mails raises the need to monitor and remove illegitimate messages, thus ensuring proper functioning of the Microsoft Exchange system.
Mail spam adds trouble and decreases productivity and is a major threat to todays business world . Companies get tons of indecent, deceptive and irking e-mails in bulk regularly. Spam is the word most commonly used to express discarded, unwanted and promotional mails. It is not an acronym so it does not really denote something. Actually, a spam e-mail is usually a commercial mail sent to the recipients who did not request any kind of information from the company or the individual sending it.
Being bombarded with huge volum of unwanted e-mails with commercial content can cost businesses and individuals lots of resources and time while sorting and deleting unsolicited messages from the legitimate messages. This hinders an effective organisation and generates frustrated employees.
Deleting spam is a time consuming process, email server up-time and performance suffers, and your network faces a security risk from malevolent messages. Added to that, a company also risk that spam e-mails causes harm to systems and network that cannot be repaired which means disorder, work loss and increased costs.
The only measure against the spam threat ensuring total security and protection is professional assistance. Thus, the server should be shielded to assure that all the passing information is filtered and fire-walled against spam. Typically, a server spam filter is a software application that scrutinizes the incoming messages, spotting spam on the basis of pre-determined configurations while detaching the unwanted e-mail so that it never reaches the users inbox. And one of the widely used servers is that developed by Microsoft. Dubbed as Exchange Server, this Microsoft product makes e-mailing more speedy and resourceful.
Anti spam plugins for Microsoft Exchange is a great help filtering and avoiding spam mail. A server side spam filter enables users to automate the procedure to sort and remove spam at the server level i.e. before it reaches the internal network and each user’s personal computer. Automating is a suggested task as it saves the personal computer, and time of users in addition to the network from damage which can lead to data loss and downtime.
No anti-spam technology is perfect, periodically manual checking of all filtered messages by a network administrator is still needed to ensure that Exchange mail server is not blocking any legitimate e-mails.