This is for my clients whose mail is protected by Exchange Defender.

Some background for the rest of you: Exchange Defender is an inexpensive service that filters and archives all the mail sent to a business. It strips all virus attachments, drops all misaddressed messages, and holds onto the spam. Only legitimate messages are delivered to the server at the business. The effect is to drastically reduce the load on the server and the business’ Internet connection. In addition, Exchange Defender keeps a searchable archive of all messages sent and received by the business for as long as a year, providing an additional layer of protection in a crisis. It has a very, very low rate of false positives – legitimate messages are rarely caught by mistake.

(It’s well suited for any business running Small Business Server; almost all my clients with SBS rely on Exchange Defender. You need a partner to set it up for your business. If you’re interested, drop me a note or give me a call.)

Until now, the best method to review spam messages was a daily email report listing all the messages. Now those are becoming impractical; the daily messages aren’t timely enough for some people and they’re only getting longer (and easier to ignore) as the volume of spam grows.

If your mail is filtered by Exchange Defender and you use Outlook 2007, consider installing an Outlook add-in that will give you tools for checking your spam and reacting to it in Outlook. You can download the “Exchange Defender Outlook 2007 Agent” from this page. To install it:

  • Exit Outlook by clicking on File / Exit. (If you just click the X in the upper right, several Outlook processes will probably continue running. If you click on File / Exit, it closes completely.)
  • You’ll download and save a Zip file. After it’s downloaded, click on it and click on “Extract files.” Save them somewhere you can find them.
  • Find the extracted files and click on setup.exe to install the agent.

When Outlook starts, you’ll have to log in with your email address and your Exchange Defender password.

The result is a new toolbar with buttons to view quarantined messages in real time and react if necessary to add senders to your white list or release messages trapped by mistake. There’s also an interesting statistics window. Mine is particularly egregious because I’ve been using my email address freely for a long time.

exchangedefenderstatistics

Yup, that’s 1800-2400 messages each day. It makes me feel kind of proud. Exchange Defender filters it and I only see the little tiny bar on the right each day.

The Outlook agent does not work in Outlook 2003. If you want some increased access to information about your spam but you don’t have Outlook 2007, you can download a desktop agent from the same page that sits down by the clock, alerting you every hour to new spam messages. Or you can follow these brief instructions to create a desktop shortcut that takes you automatically to the Exchange Defender portal for reviewing spam and changing settings.

The company that runs Exchange Defender believes strongly that this software should replace the daily reports. If you want help installing it, please give me a call – it only takes a moment!

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