In this article we take a closer look at edge transport servers in Ms Exchange and learn how they increase both availability and security of your email data.
Edge Transport Server in MS Exchange helps reduce areas that are vulnerable to threats, meaning the attack surface. Edge Transport severs are able to do this by managing incoming mails. The agents which use Edge Transport Servers are often used for protection by providing additional layers of security. They are mainly used for protecting your mails from unwanted spam, by applying transport rules. The Edge Transport Server is usually installed within the network perimeter of the organization, it neither has access to information in Active Directory, nor is it the member of the internal active directory forest of an organization. However, it does make use of the information contained in Active Directory.
Exchange users have the option of deploying multiple Edge Transport Servers in the network perimeter. By deploying multiple Edge Transport Servers in your network perimeter you can get failover and redundancy capabilities for all the incoming messages, thus increasing both, the availability and security of all your messages. A few more important aspects you need to know about Edge Transport Server are given below.
Internet Mail Flow
The Edge Transport Servers accept incoming messages from all corners of the Internet but where it routs them ahead will depend on how you have configured it.
- If you have the client access and server and mailbox server on different systems, the mail will be routed to Transport Service over mailbox server.
- On the contrary, if both client access server and mailbox server are on similar systems, the mail will first be routed to Front End Transport service present over client access server, and will then be routed to Transport Service present over mailbox servers.
Anti Spam Protection
Hackers today have become very advanced and make use of multiple and competitive ways to get access to your mails. Some spam emails can also contain malicious programs which corrupt your data and force you to perform an exchange recovery. Edge Transport Server deploys multiple agents in the network perimeter, thus preventing hackers from gaining access to your account, and securing your mails.
Edge Transport Rules
This can help you control the flow of messages coming-in and going-out over Internet. These rules are configured for all the Edge Transport Servers, to protect all the corporate resources in the network and data, through messages containing specific conditions for application. The conditions that are applied using Edge Transport Rules are also based on a particular sets of condition such as type of data, text in the header, text body or the address. Multiple actions determine the authenticity of a processed situation, the types of actions possible include rejecting a message, quarantining a message, adding more recipient or logging events.
Address Rewriting
This presents the external recipients with a consistent appearance of an email address. This feature can be configured on Edge Transport Servers for modification of SMTP Servers on both incoming and outgoing messages. This feature greatly helps organizations which have merged recently and are interested in making an email address appear consistency to all external recipients.
Author Introduction:
Van Sutton is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including repair Outlook file and bkf recovery software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com
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