Enabling Spam Quarantine

Now that the mailbox has been created and we have created a policy to delete messages older than 15 days we can enable the quarantine feature of Exchange 2007.

1)      Navigate to the Organization Configuration\Hub Transport node and click the Anti-Spam tab

2)      Open the properties of “Content Filtering”

3)      Click the Actions tab

4)      Set the settings based on how aggressive you want the filtering to be, I suggest the following:

a)      Delete: 9

b)      Reject: 8

c)      Quarantine: 7

5)      Enter the e-mail address of the spam quarantine mailbox

6)      Click OK to save changes

Opening the Spam Quarantine mailbox

In order to resend messages that were quarantined you need to open the mailbox in Outlook or via OWA.

Option 1: Open Inbox

1)      In Outlook choose File\Open\Other User’s Folder…

2)      Confirm Folder type is set to Inbox

3)      Enter the name of the Spam quarantine mailbox and click OK

See KB290824 for more info

Option 2: Open Mailbox

This option allows you to open the entire mailbox, which will show up in your tree of folders.  This can be done a couple of ways, which vary depending upon which version of Outlook you are using.

Outlook 2003

From: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP052421391033.aspx

1)      On the Tools menu, click E-Mail Accounts.

2)      Click View or change existing e-mail accounts, and then click Next

3)      In the list, click the Exchange account type, and then click Change

4)      Click More Settings, and then click the Advanced tab

5)      Click Add, and then type the mailbox name of the person whose mailbox you want to add to your user profile

Outlook 2007

1)      On the Tools menu, click Account Settings

2)      In the “E-mail” list, click the Microsoft Exchange account type, and then click Change

3)      Click More Settings, and then click the Advanced tab

4)      Click Add…, and then type the mailbox name of the person whose mailbox you want to add to your user profile

5)      Click OK, OK, Next, Finish, Close to complete the process

 

At this point the spam quarantine mailbox should show up in the Outlook folder tree.

Option 3: Open via OWA

1)      Login to your mailbox using OWA

2)      Click on your name in the upper right corner

3)      Enter the name of the Spam quarantine mailbox and click Open…

Resending blocked messages

To resend a blocked message is very straight forward.

1)      Open the message in the spam quarantine mailbox using Outlook or OWA

2)      Locate the message that needs to be resent

3)      Open the message and click the Send Again button

4)      Then click Send on the message

Note: The From address will show you as the sender by default.  If your account has Send As rights to the Spam Quarantine mailbox, you could put that mailbox name it in the From field instead.

Conclusion

Using the steps above, you can be a bit more aggressive on blocking spam without increasing the chance that the valid or false positive messages are lost.  You could even disable both the rejecting and deleting of all messages, and have all possible spam messages go into the quarantine mailbox.  However, this is not suggested due to the VERY high volume of spam today.  With the settings of 9/8/7 (Delete/Reject/Quarantine) messages will still be delivered to user’s Junk Mail folder.  If users complain about getting too many, you could lower the Quarantine number to 6 or 5.  If too many false positives are received, you will then need to increase the number.

Another tip is to look at using Transport Rules to whitelist messages by setting the spam confidence level (SCL) to -1.  You can also use the “Custom Words” and the “Exceptions” tab on the Content Filtering properties dialog to further prevent false positives.