How to Stay away from Unsolicited Emails with Anti-spam Agents in Exchange

Learn How Anti-spam agents present in Ms Exchange server can protect you from the deluge of unsolicited emails.

No matter how secure your mail client or mail server is, you will still end up receiving some amount of spam in your account. MS Exchange comes loaded with in-built anti spam agents to protect users from unsolicited emails. However, these agents are not activated by default. To activate all the available anti spam agents in Exchange, you will first have to install the Edge Transport Server in the perimeter network. After you have installed it, all the anti spam agents will get activated thus protecting you from spam and other unsolicited mails. Given below is a description of the anti spam agents present in Exchange.

Anti spam Agents present on Mailbox in MS Exchange

Anti spam agents present in Mailbox are assigned a priority number. These priority numbers determine the order in which the agents will get to act on the message. An agent with a greater priority number will act after an agent with a lower priority number. Meaning, an agent with priority number 1 or 2, will get to act on the message before an agent with priority number 9 or 10. These agents are registered in a transport pipeline with an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) event, these events also determine the order in which the agents will get to act on the message. If an agent with a greater priority number is registered ahead in the pipeline, it will act before an agent with lower priority registered later in the pipeline.

Anti spam Agents present on Edge Transport Server in MS Exchange

The Edge Transport Server in MS Exchange is responsible for handling the flow the of messages, it comes with three different spam filtering agents for all incoming and outgoing messages.

• Connection filtering Agents:  They make use of an IP allow list and an IP block list, which detects if an id should be allowed or should it be blocked.
• Recipient Filter Agents:  This makes use of a recipient block list to determine whether an id should be allowed or not.
• Attachment Filtering Agents:  This is used for filtering messages with attachment. The attachments are filtered on the basis of name, extension and type of content.

How can using the Anti spam features in Exchange 2016 benefit you?

1. Like any other built-in anti spam feature of an application, anti spam in MS Exchange also provides protection from unsolicited spam and junk mails.
2. The anti spam features in Exchange are multi-layered, thus providing complete protection from unsolicited spam mails.
3. The anti spam in Exchange acts towards maintaining a balance between the junk mails and the important mails.
4. The features allow for customization, user can increase or decrease the aggressiveness of anti spam features. This is done in response to the type of junk being received by the organization.
5. By increasing aggressiveness of the agents, you can better fight the spam. By using MS Exchange along with the anti spam features, you can provide users with a safe and secure working environment and bring down incidents of data corruption and orphaned Exchange ost file recovery operations

Author Introduction:

Van Sutton is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including repair Outlook email problem and bkf recovery software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com