Real World Computing
Exclaiming Exclaimer!
Then there's the email-archiving facility, which allows you to silently copy all email traffic to a specified mailbox. But that's not the end of it - when I said all email traffic, I meant all - as it includes all internal mail traffic too. This goes a long way beyond those products that just sit in the SMTP queue and catch incoming and outgoing email types; it hooks the internal movements as well.
There's also the Anti-Spam engine, which is scenario-driven and offers you six main deployment settings to play with. The first is IT Evaluation, whereby all messages classified as spam only get marked in their Internet headers, which allows a test environment to be created without upsetting the users. The second is End User Rollout, wherein messages classified as spam are marked as such both in their subject line and in their Internet headers. By doing this, you can get feedback from users, because they'll easily spot emails the engine is classifying as spam or bulk emailing. The next scenario is Deployed, whereby those messages that are marked as spam will get blocked, those which might be spam have an SCL (Spam Confidence Level) set and all other messages remain unmarked.
If you're running up-to-date servers and clients, the scenario 'Deployed: Only Exchange 2003 with Outlook 2003' will be of interest to you, as it works like Deployed but uses the latest features of Outlook and Exchange in the process. Then there's 'Isolated/lab server environment', in which messages are marked and Exclaimer will detect the difference between real spam and spam that's been simulated or forwarded. This is especially useful in the larger organisation that wants to deliberately inject spam into its internal mail system to see how various services, gateways and other protection facilities will deal with it. It's not recommended as a deployment strategy, though. And finally you get to Custom, which opens up all the settings and the whole engine, and allows you to fiddle to your heart's content.
This brings me to the real heart of the product - its custom rules engine. Simply put, everything I've described up until now is just a set of presets for this rules engine. If you're feeling particularly brave, delving into the rules engine itself is for you, as it allows you to do everything. For example, let's have a rule that fires whenever the sender is in a particular Active Directory Organisational Unit and the recipient is 'not' 'Anyone external'. The list of options on offer in this case is remarkable: I could have chosen 'Anyone', 'Anyone internal', 'Anyone in the Active Directory', 'Anyone with an X400 address', 'Anyone external', 'Any Active Directory Contact', 'Email address', 'Email domain', 'Active Directory container', 'Active Directory Users and Groups', 'Active Directory Attributes', 'Subject contains', or 'Message header equals', and that's just for starters.
Next up, I can choose the delivery options. For example, I could opt to deliver the message but change the From: and Reply To: addresses to something else. Or, I could deliver the message, but change the destination so that email sent to an address or domain is rerouted to another domain or address. We're not done yet. I now have a full set of disclaimer options for this individual rule, and then a set of choices for email archiving. Did I mention the auto-responder options and the open plug-in architecture too?
I hope you're now getting a flavour of the power of Exclaimer. Rather than just write an SMTP trap that wraps the traffic around a single Exchange Server, this is something that goes right into the guts of the engine and traps everything. And the rules engine lets you manipulate what's going on in ways that just aren't possible with Exchange Server itself, unless you start writing a whole pile of scripting code. And who wants to do that?
