Microsoft Email Server - How to prevent Spam

By: Jane Y. Whigmore

The increase in the amount of spam e-mails raise the need to monitor and eliminate unwanted messages - ensuring that the Microsoft Exchange system function correctly

In todays business world, junk mail has emerged as the biggest evil that is cutting productivity and adding troubles. 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 abbreviation or acronym (so spam does not denote something). Normally a spam mail contains commercial content and it is send to receivers who never reqeusted to get that kind of information from the business or individual that sends 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.

Getting rid of spam is a lengthy process, it hurts e-mail server performance and malevolent e-mails are a threat to network security Furthermore, the company also faces the risk as these spam mails might lead to irreparable harm to the systems, thus causing disorder and big loss of work and capital to the company.

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. A spam filter for e-mail servers is typically an intelligent application that filters all new messages, finds spam on the basis of a chosen configuration and blocks all unwanted e-mails preventing them from passing all the way to the users inbox. And one of the widely used servers is that developed by Microsoft. Dubbed as Exchange Server, this Microsoft product makes e-mailing more speedy and resourceful.

Spam devices can be of great help to carry out filtering at an exchange server or unwanted mail blocking at exchange server. A server spam filter facilitates the users to automate the spam removal procedure at the server level - the receiving source before it reaches the network of personal computers. Making this process automatic is recommended as it protects each personal computer, it protects the internal network and prevents work loss and users’ downtime.

No anti-spam technology is perfect, periodically manual checking of all filtered messages by a network administrator is still needed to ensure that Exchange mail server is not blocking any legitimate e-mails.