With the ever increasing volume of spam e-mails (98% of all e-mail at the last count I’m sure I read somewhere), there are plenty of spam filtering methods around now (including hosted services and applications to be installed on your servers), but if you’re using Exchange 2007, you may be able to use the in-built functionality instead.
Anti-Spam functionality is usually reserved for Edge Transport servers within an Exchange 2007 infrastructure, but many organisations do not have this role in place, due to the cost of installing a seperate server. It is, however, possible to enable the Anti-Spam filtering on the server hosting the Hub Transport role – as this is not a fully supported or recommended option, it’s not an obvious option to enable, though, and certainly isn’t enabled by default..
Enabling it is easy, as I’ll show below.
Firstly if you open Microsoft Powershell (Or “Exchange Management Shell“) on the Hub Transport server and:
cd %system drive%/Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Scripts
Obviously if you have installed Exchange to a different path, then you need to cd there instead – you basically need to be inside the “Scripts” directory which is in the main Exchange Server installation path.
Once in this directory, you can do:
./install-AntispamAgents.ps1
This will install the required files, and then to finish off, you will need to restart the Transport service:
Restart-Service MSExchangeTransport
And that’s it! You’ll now have full anti-spam functionality on the Hub Transport server. You can either configure it using Powershell or, if you open the Exchange Management Console, you’ll notice an extra tab within “Organization Configuration” on the “Hub Transport” section called “Anti-Spam” – here, you can set a whole range of options.
I’ve used many anti-spam services for Exchange, and this is about one of the best – I have it configured to put e-mail marked as spam straight into the users Junk E-Mail folder within their own mailbox – no need for quarantines by doing it this way.
You can read more about this functionality on TechNet here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201691.aspx
What do you think? Have you tried it? Do you have better options for spam filtering within Exchange 2007? Let me know.