Sign in
 
HomeOnline20132010Other VersionsLibraryForumsGalleryEHLO Blog
TechCenter >
> 
> 
Anti-Spam advice needed

Unanswered Anti-Spam advice needed

  • Monday, September 10, 2007 9:38 PM
     
     
    Sign In to Vote
    0

    My client is being hammered by spam daily...  They are a small business with 5 users running exchange 2007 on SBS 2003.  I have the Exchange anti-spam tool running but it is not helping. We are also running Symatec Anti-virus with groupware support but we do not have the anti-spam feature.   I need advice on if I should recommend a Sonicwall device or some other device and if so what do you all recommend.

     

     

    Thanks

     

All Replies

  • Tuesday, September 11, 2007 4:27 PM
     
     
    Sign In to Vote
    0

    With a small shop, maybe a Barracuda?  They are pretty much set and forget.

     

    Also, if they have Symantec, how about the Brightmail addition to it?

     

     
  • Saturday, September 22, 2007 2:24 AM
     
     
    Sign In to Vote
    0

    I can tell you from experience that the Exchange 2007 anti-spam tools are working extremely well for us. I have users in my deployment that previously used Trend's IMSS and find what we've done with Exchange 2007 to be superior -- and these are *VERY* discriminating users.

     

    We are enterprise licensed, and use Forefront to get our anti-spam updates. It took a bit of tuning to get the configuration right. The most valuable tool I found was the agent logs (Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\TransportRoles\Logs\AgentLog) to see how messages are getting classified in terms of SCL.

     

    Also, you may need to manually turn on server-side filtering of Junk E-Mail. There is a lot of confusion on this topic, and Microsoft hasn't released the right set of information to make it easy for you to do this. The key things you need to know are:

    • You need to turn on server-side filtering on a PER-USER basis. Forget about the fact that there is an organization-wide SCLJunkThreshold setting. As far as I can tell, that setting does nothing. You **MUST** turn on SCLJunkEnabled and set the SCLJunkThreshold for each user, otherwise no server-side processing will take place. Nobody will tell you this explicitly.
    • The setting on OWA to "Automatically filter junk e-mail" is *COMPLETELY DIFFERENT* than the Outlook setting to filter junk email. The OWA setting enables/disables the server-side rule that automatically moves junk email that exceeds the threshold you set (PER USER... see bullet above) to the Junk E-Mail folder
    • The Junk E-Mail folder must be created by Outlook before the OWA setting will actually do anything. This is because the name of the Junk E-Mail folder is localized to a specific language, and until the language of the user is known, the Junk E-Mail folder cannot be created.

    I could be wrong about any of the points above. I found Exchange 2007 spam control to be great, but you've pretty much got to figure it out yourself because there is frightningly little documentation out there to help you understand how all of these piece-parts come together. That's not a criticism of Microsoft, just a fact at this time... and that's why these forums exist -- to help fill the gaps.

     

    - Jim

     
  • Monday, September 24, 2007 2:48 PM
     
     
    Sign In to Vote
    0
    Jim - very handy post thanks!