Chapter 6. Spam, Viruses, and Compliance

Not only do members of your organization spend valuable time deleting spam, but spam can also disrupt people’s attention, drawing their minds from their work. Spam also has the effect of clogging up your organization’s connection to the Internet and of consuming disk space on your mailbox database servers. Every megabyte that is used to store undeleted spam is a megabyte that is not being used to store e-mail that people actually want to read. Viruses are even worse than spam, as they are a direct attack on your organization. A successful virus infection can take hours to disinfect or, worse, be used to compromise company security by forwarding sensitive communication to nefarious third parties. The architecture of Exchange Server 2007 allows you to deal preemptively with these dual threats out on the perimeter of your network rather than in the more vulnerable core. You can configure an edge transport server to block viruses and spam from passing across your organization’s firewall so that users are unaware of its existence.

Compliance is another issue that is becoming increasingly important to mail administrators. Compliance is about ensuring that important business communication is stored according to policies that meet appropriate legislative requirements. These requirements are different, depending on the jurisdiction your organization falls under. Compliance is one of those unusual areas where systems administration practice is as much dictated by technical realities as it is by your organization’s lawyers. Implementing compliance policies involves taking legal guidelines and applying them using the Exchange Server 2007 administration tools.