ExchangeDefender is a Winner

As most of you know, we run our writing and consulting business on Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2. It includes Exchange Server 2003 SP2, and we've been using the same, quite public, email addresses for at least 17 years since our first book, and publishing that address in our books. So we get a LOT of SPAM. The Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) version 2 that is part of Exchange helped a lot, but management of it was becoming increasingly onerous, even with IMF Companion. And, frankly, way too much stuff was getting through, while the false positive rate was too high to simply delete it all. Finally, a friend/fellow MVP offered a solution - ExchangeDefender. Well, I admit, I was skeptical of how much better it could be, but I decided it was worth a try. Well, all I can say is "Wow". Setup was trivial - I just told Vlad what my domain names were, and then changed the DNS MX records for my domains to point to his server. Oh, and set up his server as my "smarthost" in Exchange as well. Once the DNS settled down, I also restricted Exchange to only accept SMTP from his servers. That was all that I really had to do, but of course there was some tweaking required. I had to go in and add all the alternate email addresses we use on our main accounts, and I had to add my whitelist of known good folks. Both of these were a bit more of a nuisance than absolutely necessary, since they required doing each one individually instead of being able to add them in a bunch. But it's a one time thing, and it's done now. (And it's logged as a suggestion for the next version of ExchangeDefender.)

So, what are the results? Simply amazing. Our daily SPAM has dropped by 99+%. From nearly 1,000 SPAM messages a day, to somewhere around 10-15. And even when this latest round of stock pumping increased the level worldwide, we didn't have any change.

So, if you're getting buried under SPAM, and want a really first rate operation to take the load off you, without limiting your ability to manage accounts yourself, ExchangeDefender is a winner!

Charlie.