An employee comes to you and reports they are receiving email from an old friend and they don’t want it anymore, or the HR department manager is getting inappropriate emails from an ex-employee, do you know what to do.
Now, you could go out and purchase a third-party tool to block the mail, but with Exchange 2000 you have a simple but effective solution available to you, its called “Message Filtering”, and in this document we will walk through how to set it up.
Setting up filtering is actually done in two steps, the first step is to define a list of addresses that we would like to filter and the second step is enabling the filter.
1. Open the Exchange System Manager
2. Expand the Global Settings
3. Right-Click Message Delivery, and select Properties
4. Select the Filtering tab, the Filtering dialogue box will now appear.
5. Click on Add, the Add Sender dialogue box will now appear.
You must now enter the email address that you would like to add to the filter list, we can use the asterisks (*) as a wild character in the email address, the table below shows some of the combinations of email addresses that we could use:
Address | Result |
Blocks mail coming from [email protected] | |
| *@spam.com | Blocks mail coming from anyone at spam.com |
*@spam.* | Blocks mail coming from anyone at with a domain of spam, so spam.com, spam.net, spam.org would be blocked. |
*@*.spam.com | Blocks mail from subdomains of spam.com, for example mail coming from support.spam.com would be blocked. |
We now have three checkboxes to use, if you want messages from the sender in the filter list to be moved to an archive, you can select “Archive filtered messages”, the archive directory will be by default Exchsrvr\Mailroot\SERVER\Filter, where SERVER is the name of your virtual server, we will also need to select “Accept messages without notifying sender of filtering” for the archive feature to work.
We can select “Filter messages with blank sender”, this is fairly self explanatory, but be careful with this as some System generated messages have a blank sender, and if we block these it might cause us some problems.
Once we have created our filter list, the next step is to enable it on our SMTP virtual server.
1. Open the Exchange System Manager
2. Navigate down to your server, this will either be at the first level of the System Manager under the Servers container, or you will need to open Administrative Groups, then select the relevant administrative group, then select Servers.
3. Expand the Protocols container under your server
4. Expand the SMTP container
5. Right-click on the Virtual Server that you would like to apply your filtering to, and select Properties, the virtual server properties dialogue box will now appear.
6. Click the Advanced button, the Advanced dialogue box will now appear.
7. Select the relevant IP address, and then click on Edit, the Identification dialogue box will now be displayed.
8. Select the Apply Filter checkbox.
We have now enabled Filtering for this virtual server using the list of address that we specified in the Filtering List.
This is not going to stop all the unnecessary mail that your company receives and I would recommend to anyone using Exchange to invest some money in one of the many message filtering and content control packages on the market today.
For more information about third-party applications that perform message filtering take a look at
http://www.msexchange.org/software/software.asp?cat=AntiSpam and http://www.msexchange.org/software/software.asp?cat=ContentChecking
