The way you would respond is rarely to anyone's advantage Don ;)
Joe Heaton ________________________________ From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 7:14 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Assistance requested for issues with mail flow and writing a report Wow... Good Luck Graeme. I suppose you could recite RFC's, but you did say plain English was a requirement... I know how I would respond, but that may not be to your advantage... ;o) On Jan 24, 2008 1:11 AM, Graeme Carstairs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Fellow list members I am looking for some help with the following. One of our clients has been bought over by a large corporate, whilst our client still retains some level of independence the parent company is looking to integrate them onto the global WAN and AD and as such our client is stuck as to what they can and cannot buy for AV etc. They have been using Exchange 2003 locally for some time with Antigen as the AV. They also use IMF and Antigens spam filters to deal with junk mail, with a moderate degree of success. Last week for whatever reason which if any of you have used Antigens spam filters will know reason are hard to find, approx 25 legitimate mails were quarantined, along with the 18,000 spams that it quarantined. Now this would not normally be a problem, but one of their clients has had issues receiving mail, and there was delays on incoming mail from a few other clients. I have tracked this back to a change in the parent companies routing and the routers taking some time to update. Again this would not normally be an issue, but an important e-mail sent from a client during this time was not received, and I am being asked to write a full report on what happend and why this one e-mail was not received and what will be done in the short term and longterm. Upon trawling through the IMF, Antigen and Message tracking logs on the server their is no record of this e-mail being received by their system, and when the client resent the mail it came through instantly. As mentioned above during this time there was another client claiming that they were not receiving mail from our client, and when checking the message transfer logs it show that these e-mails were transfered to the clients Mail servers within minutes of our client sending them. I am looking to take the tack of explaining that throughout all the logs on our clients system there is no record of the mail being received by our clients mail servers, and the senders IT department have taken the attitude that there is no problem as all other mail is getting through. Is there any resource out their that can provide simple plain English, non technical explanation of why e-mail is not guaranteed, and i can add that we can only control and ensure that our clients mail server is working satisfactorily but if the mail isnt transferred to it there is nothing we can really do. With regards to the spam filtering, i am going to explain that no spam filter can 100% guarantee that there will be no false positives, but all mail detected as spam is quarantined and the quarantine is checked daily. WIth the lack of configuration options in Antigen and IMF, we will whitelist any legitimate senders that the filter has blocked as spam. The long term fix is when our client integrates with their parent company, they will change to using the parent companies mail servers and their spam filtering service through message labs, but there is no changes to software used that we are allowed to make short term. Has any one else got any other suggestions, or tips on how to deal with the request. TIA Graeme -- "Good News Everyone, you just received an e-mail from me." ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
