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My UPDATE columns for this week and next cover the process of updating Exchange 2003 to handle the upcoming DST change. (I’ll update this post with links to the columns when they’re published.) Oddly, as I was writing this week’s installment, I found myself wondering how Notes and Domino will manage the DST transition; today I saw Ed’s post on the topic. Apparently no matter whose messaging system you use, it’s still a messy process. Of course, Exchange 2007 doesn’t have this problem; if you hurry maybe you can get your environment upgraded before the DST switchover 🙂

UPDATE: here’s part 1 of the series.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

So I was trying to figure out how to exempt a particular IP address from connection filtering on an Exchange Edge Transport server. I needed to do this to keep Edge from deciding that the internal relay server was generating spam. It’s going to be injecting spam (for some tests I’m doing), but I didn’t want the sender reputation agent to decide that the server was a spammer itself.

My first thought was to add the server’s IP to the IP accept list. That wouldn’t work, though, because mail coming from IPs that appear on the accept list are tagged with an SCL of -1, indicating that no further filtering is necessary. I could have turned off connection filtering altogether, but I didn’t want to do that either. Finally I broke down and pinged a friend who works for Microsoft, and once he understood what I wanted to do he came up with the right answer: I needed to use the set-transportConfig cmdlet’s -internalSMTPServers flag.

Once I knew that, I was able to find references to the cmdlet all over the place (including one at Bharat’s blog from yesterday… I guess that’s a good reason to be more diligent about my blog reading!) As much as I’ve worked with Exchange 2007 over the last year, I still have a lot to learn.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

Devin asked me, and I realized that apart from TCP 5060 (for SIP) I didn’t know. A little googling, however, produced this topic in the Exchange documentation. See table 1, which shows the remaining ports that you have to keep open to make UM work across a firewall.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging

On the heels of my EWS post the other day, a new post from Microsoft’s Wes Haggard, this time explaining how to use EWS to find contacts.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

This is a hassle; I got two separate notifications from fellow MVPs that my Barracuda box was blocking their inbound mail. When I checked the Barracuda logs, sure enough, it had rejected both messages; the reason listed was “Intent (xmlsoap.org)”.

“Intent” is the status code the ‘cuda uses to indicate that it blocked a message because it contains a spammish URL; it’s essentially the equivalent of SURBL. I checked the two messages, and sure enough they contain a reference to xmlsoap: “http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/”. However, this reference comes from the original message in the thread, which was an HTML message! Apparently somewhere in the round-trip reply cycle, the HTML version was converted to plain text, which exposed the xmlsoap reference, which the Barracuda improperly blocked. Evidently spammers have sent HTML-formattted mail from Outlook before, so xmlsoap.org has ended up on the intent list. Thankfully the Barracuda interface has an easy-to-find “Exempt this URL” link, so I could clear the ban, but it’s still not what I would’ve expected.

Excellent news: the 32-bit versions of the Exchange 2007 management tools are now available. This download includes the Exchange Management Console, the Exchange Management Shell, ExBPA, and the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007