MS Exchange Mail Server – How to Filter Spam
October 28th, 2009
MS Email Server – How to prevent Spam
By: Jane Y. Whigmore
Increasing threat from spam emails raises the need to monitor and remove illegitimate messages, thus ensuring correct functioning of the MS Exchange system.
Mail spam has turned out to be one of the greatest threats for todays business world because they add trouble and cut down productivity. Thousands of deceptive and indecent e-mails are sent to companies in bulk on a daily basis. The term Spam is a commonly used jargon to explain promotional and undesirable e-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.
Removing spam is a lengthy process; performance of the e-mail server gets several affected and network security is also put at greater risk from malevolent e-mails. 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 guard against the threat from spam is professional asistance ensuring complete security and protection. 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. One of the often used mail servers is the Exchange Server developed by Microsoft, and this product from Microsoft makes core mail services fast and reliable.
Anti spam plugins for Microsoft Exchange is a great help filtering and stoppping 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.
As the anti-spam technology cant be taken as perfect, conducting a manual checking by network administrator is a suitable measure to scrutinize the periodically filtered out messages to ensure that the exchange server spam filter is not detecting messages that are not really spam.
