TechnoMagicians Blog

From SpamBlogging:

There is a feature in Exchange 2003 that is “new” (meaning that it wasn't in Exchange prior to this release). Under the “connection filtering” you can set it up to check messages against RBL servers and then toss them if they don't pass …

I'll post this here because I'll hear from a number of people contemplating using SimpleFilter in place of spam filtering in Microsoft Exchange. They'll say something like “look, Microsoft is doing this so I don't need SimpleFilter”.

The short answer to this goes as follows. This is a new feature of Microsoft Exchange. We've been using it for well over a year. RBL's are changing regularly and results from them change over time as well. Unless one is monitoring them continuously like we do for SimpleFilter you're asking for trouble. Also, a hit from an RBL should never be considered black or white. It seems that is your only choice with Microsoft. We have great flexibilty with the results we get from an RBL and those are honed in real-time.

I should mention that people typically use RBL when they really mean DNS Block Lists which is what is talked about above. We've moved well beyond DNS Block Lists and various other types of block lists as well. It probably won't be till late 2005 that Microsoft discovers some of the other block lists that we've already moved on from.

I should also mention that DNS Block Lists and other Block Lists that we use are a very small piece of the overall methods we use for SimpleFilter that in total help to determine the likelihood that an email is spam.

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