Category Archives: General Stuff

The next product on my evaluation list is CMS’ Praetor. My initial impression is that this is a complex, full-featured product, and it’s expensive, too. (The fact that CMS is offering a 30% discount if you’re using a competing product helps reduce the sting somewhat.) It supports X- headers for filtering and has a range of quarantine options. However, I’m not crazy about three aspects of the product:

• it doesn’t use the Windows Installer, and its custom installer doesn’t bother to check for existing SMTP services on a machine
• it has its own separate administration program (which apparently can’t be installed on any machine other than the one running Praetor– so much for remote administration)
• it doesn’t integrate directly with Exchange. Although CMS says you can run it on your Exchange server, they seem to recommend running it on a separate box, so that’s what I’m doing. It didn’t coexist well with ISA in my very limited testing, so for now it’s on a separate machine.

I’m also not too impressed with the documentation; while it is complete, it’s formatted using the old “ransom note” style template, and it’s a reference. For a product this complex, a task-oriented doc would be much more useful.

MailEssentials has been running for the last week or so. After a little experimentation, I discovered that it wasn’t catching spam because I’m an idiot. I hadn’t specified any SMTP domains as inbound, so ME was looking for spam sent to *@robichaux.local– since robichaux.net and 3sharp.com are the domains I use, it wasn’t catching anything. After I fixed that, it began behaving as expected. However, its lack of a way to add subject tags to indicate spam means that I have to route all suspected spam to a public folder– where E2K turns it into an IPM.Post item, so it loses its original addressee information. Redirecting all the spam to a single mailbox works, but that raises the question of how to redirect it; the only way I can see to do it is with a script that adds a spam tag to the subject and redirects the message. That’s more trouble than I’m willing to go to for this product. In GFI’s favor, their product installs and uninstalls cleanly, it’s stable, and it has good documentation. However, it’s time to try something else.
UPDATE: GFI support confirms that their product doesn’t allow subject rewriting, and they’re not likely to add it.

So, I finally decided that the volume of spam on my servers had grown past my ability to tolerate. I decided to hold a spam-off by testing several well-known products and reporting the results here. My critieria are simple if unscientific: whichever product gives the best price/performance/usability ratio wins.
I started with GFI MailEssentials, which has been widely praised in a variety of places. It downloaded and installed easily (great installer), but after three days, it hasn’t caught any spam, at least according to its own logs! It doesn’t offer a way to quarantine spam into a public folder, and there’s no way to mark a message as suspected spam. Other than that, it’s great 🙂 I’ll post an update after I check with their technical support; I can see that the event sink is working because some messages from hosts on the ORBS RBL have been NDR’d (at least according to the logs).

Hallejulah! Microsoft has released a patch that allows the Exchange System Manager tool to run on Windows XP. As it turns out, getting this done took a lot of work from several product teams at Microsoft. Good for them– this is a welcome, if overdue, release.

TechNet is sponsoring yet another Exchange security chat, this one with folks from the ISA Server product team. April 9, from 1200-1300 EST / 0900-1000 PST / 1600-1700 GMT.

Two more security-related TechNet chats to announce this week:

• Wireless security (March 5, 1000 PST/1300 EST/1800 GMT). Are you thinking about setting up a wireless network at the office? At home? If so, you won’t want to miss this chat. We can answer questions about how to control who accesses your network, WEP, and integration with Windows. (Attend the web cast immediately prior to this chat for additional information on wireless security.)
• Exchange security (March 5, 0700 PST/1000 EST/1500 GMT) Come and ask your questions relating to Exchange Security. Questions can range from email virus protection to encryption to OWA configurations. Come test your questions against skilled Microsoft Technology Specialists.

Sure, you could read my book; if you really wanted the straight scoop, you could buy Shinder’s ISA book, which has a wealth of ISA-specific information. You could also read this free article from SecurityFocus to help you get started.

The always-subtle Kim Cameron-Webb came up with “MEC Ed” as the new name for this year’s TechEd conference; for the first time, its content is being combined with the MEC of yore. Dallas in June? I’ll be there. Sign up now and get a $400 discount.

I’ve made a couple of minor changes to the site. First, you’ll notice that the dorky-looking Amazon blob is gone from the right side bar. No one was clicking on it anyway. Second, there’s a new form for signing up for the goodies mailing list– I’ve moved from pairlist to Topica’s paid publishing service, which means that all y’all will finally have a real interface for subscribing and unsubscribing.

My wife’s voice floated down the stairwell, jolting me away from my exciting task of filling out a matrix showing how OCS compares to Exchange. “Honey, the FedEx man left about a dozen packages on the front porch!”
Now, you have to understand that the arrival of the FedEx lady at our house is always a time of celebration. The best times are when she unexpectedly brings some kind of goodie, like a piece of review hardware. Next-best are when she brings something I’ve been anticipating, like salmon chowder or a copy of iLife. (I’ll have to tell y’all about the 50 pounds of candy some other time). When I grabbed the boxes to bring them in, I was greeted by a curious sight on the address label: “AOL Time Warner Book Group”.
This worried me; I was briefly afraid that I was the victim of a drive-by AOL CD dropoff. A glance at the side of the box, though, revealed that the boxes contained my author copies of the book! O joy! Sure enough, when I opened the first box, two copies were staring right out at me. That means that my contributing editors and reviewers will be getting copies over the next few days; the rest of you, alas, may have to actually buy it.