Microsoft Email Server – How to handle Spam
By: John J. Oimann
Rising threat from spam mails raises the need to monitor and remove illegitimate messages, thus ensuring proper 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. Spam is not an acronym, thus it doesn’t denote something. A spam e-mail is usually an e-mail with commercial content that is sent to thousands of recipients who never requested any kind of information from the person or organisation sending it.
Receiving a vast amount of unwanted commercial mails can easily end up costing individuals and companyies a lot of time and resouces because they have to sort unwanted and legitimate e-mails and remove the unwanted e-mails in the process. It generates frustrations among employees hindering efficiency.
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. In addition, businesses also face greater risk because spam e-mails can lead to harm to the systems that are difficult to repair, causing disorder, loss of work and money.
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. Normally a spam filter for an e-mail server is software that analyzes every incoming e-mail, detects spam based on standard configurations and removed the unwanted junk mails so they never end up in the users’ inbox Microsoft Exchange Mail Server is often used as preferred mail server for businesses and this system makes e-mail communication fast and resourceful.
Anti spam plugins for Microsoft Exchange is a great help filtering and blocking malicious e-mail. Filtering spam at server level allows for an automatic spam dectection and removel process that occurs before spam reaches your internal network and internal computers 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 work 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.
