If you use Microsoft Exchange for your email you should take some time to run the Exchange Best Practices Tool. I ran it on our Exchange server and luckily didn’t find any major flaws in our configuration, but the tool did point out several things that we could be doing differently.
One thing that we didn’t have configured was the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter which we were not utilizing. I recently found out about this filter because of a Microsoft Exchange class I am taking. Any added tools to combat and reduce the amount of spam entering our organization is certainly welcome. This best practice tool told me I didn’t have it enabled and how to turn it on. Just since turning it on I’ve already seen a handful of emails it has blocked that were truly spam and hadn’t been stopped by our third party spam filter Open Relay Filter by Vamsoft (which does do a great job of stopping most spam.)
The tool also pointed out several services that were running on my exchange box that were un-necessary. I was a bit nervous when I went to run it thinking I’d find a bunch of big bad things we had with our Exchange. The tool is available for download for free and is a great tool in securing and maintaining the health of Exchange email systems.