Jessica Lunsford Blog

Microsoft Mail Server - How to avoid Spam

By: Jane Y. Whigmore

Increasing threat from spam mails raises the need to monitor and remove illegitimate messages, thus ensuring correct functioning of the Microsoft Exchange system.

Junk mail has turned out to be one of the greatest threats for todays business world because they add trouble and cut down productivity. Companies receive thousands of deceptive, indecent and irking e-mails in bulk on a regular basis. Spam is a jargon used commonly to express discarded, undesirable and promotional e-mails or junk e-mails. It is not an acronym so it does not really denote something. Actually, a spam e-mail is usually a commercial mail sent to the recipients who did not request any kind of information from the company or the individual sending it.

Being bombarded with huge volum of unwanted e-mails with commercial content can cost businesses and individuals lots of resources and time while sorting and deleting unsolicited messages from the legitimate messages. This hinders an effective organisation and generates frustrated employees.

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. 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. 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 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.

Anti spam plugins for Microsoft Exchange is a great help filtering and preventing malware 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.

No technology used to filter spam is perfect. Periodically a network administrator still needs to monitor all filtered mails to prevent that Microsoft Exchange does not block legitimate mails.