Microsoft Exchange Server 2007: Tony Redmond's Guide to Successful Implementation

6.12 Client-side spam suppression 567

Chapter 6

3. If the Edge server needs to be rebuilt, perform a fresh install of

the Edge role to new (or fixed) hardware, using the original server

name.

4. Import the saved configuration data from the XML file:

.\ImportEdgeConfig.ps1 –CloneConfigData “c:\temp\

EdgeServer1.xml”

5. Run the EdgeSync subscription process to create a new subscrip-

tion to the newly rebuilt Edge server.

6. Run the

Start-EdgeSynchronization command from the hub

transport server to populate the fresh ADAM instance on the

rebuilt Edge server with data from the Active Directory.

After successfully completing these steps, you should have a fully opera-

tional Edge server that has the same configuration settings as the failed server.

6.12 Client-side spam suppression

Even with the best possible array of bastion and anti-spam edge servers

arranged to suppress incoming spam before it penetrates your network, it is

inevitable that some percentage of spam will get through to user mailboxes.

For this reason, client-side spam suppression is an important part of the over-

all defense mechanism against spam. Every version of Outlook includes some

rule processing capability that allow users to create some degree of automa-

tion in handling incoming messages. In the early days, rules took care of

tasks such as filing messages into appropriate folders and we never really had

to deal with the electronic version of junk mail, unless the messages from

some of our regular correspondents fell into that category. The typical

approach taken with rules is to look for a keyword in the message subject and

use its presence to decide whether the message should be deleted. However,

as spam became more pervasive, Outlook rules just couldn’t handle the com-

plexity of detecting the many variations of spam that got past corporate anti-

spam filters to arrive in user mailboxes. The need therefore arose for an intel-

ligent client-side anti-spam filter and that’s what Microsoft delivered in Out-

look 2003 and has continued to update since. Junk mail processing is also

available in Outlook Web Access 2003 and 2007 and both Outlook and

Outlook Web Access respect the same user preferences, albeit working in a

slightly different manner. For example, you can only use Outlook’s junk mail

filter when you work in cached Exchange mode because Outlook must

download messages before it can process them through the filter.