We’ve had a spate of messages from Outlook users who report that they cannot turn off their Junk Mail filter. These people have switched the filter off and yet messages still go to their Junk Mail folder.
We’ve had a spate of messages from Outlook users who report that they cannot turn off their Junk Mail filter. These people have switched the filter off and yet messages still go to their Junk Mail folder.
Most likely these are people on corporate networks that use Exchange Server 2003. With the release of Service Pack 1 for Exchange Server 2003, network administrators can do spam filtering on the server before the messages reach your inbox. This reduces the load for each workstation and is particularly useful for roaming users who don’t always have Outlook running.
It seems some network admins have installed the spam filter but not told their users which has led to some confusion. It seems messages that people want to receive are disappearing before they get them.
The Intelligent Message Filter uses the same basic technology to identify spam that Outlook 2003 and Hotmail use. It is installed with Service Pack 1 on the server but has to be activated separately. Small Business Server 2003 users can install the service pack however the spam filter will not work with the POP mail connector (which is a major, if not unforgivable, omission) There’s a deployment guide for network administrators, but in short the server has two stages of filtering.
All incoming messages are given a spam confidence level (SCL) – the higher the score the more likely it is to be spam. At the incoming mail gateway messages with a configured spam confidence level (SCL) are blocked. The administrator can set the SCL level and what should happen to those messages (Archived, Deleted, Rejected or no action). At a second stage a message with an SCL greater than or equal to a nominated score is moved to the users Junk Mail folder directly. Normally the setting for gateway blocking will be higher than for the second stage. The same settings apply to all users and cannot be customized.
End users should know this because not all messages sent to you will be in either your Inbox or, if considered to be spam, your Junk Mail folder. Some messages with high SCL’s will never be seen by you at all. If an overzealous administrator sets low or matching SCL thresholds then end users might not see any supposed spam at all.
We’ve been using the Intelligent Message Filter and it works quite well. We have it set to a fairly high threshold so that only the most obvious spam get archived, so most messages are allowed through and get sent to the Junk Mail folder directly. But we did warn our users so they knew where to look for ‘missing’ messages.
