For most of us, spam mail is a nuisance. For businesses, it’s a real problem. Some estimates say that spam accounts for half of all the traffic on the internet. For providers this means a lot of excess overhead just to deliver legitimate data. For small and medium businesses, it means a lot of unwanted mail hitting your employees, some of it dangerous.

Email has emerged as the primary mode of communication with co-workers, partners, customers and suppliers. But E-mail by its very nature is one of the weakest links in your corporate IT security, it’s expedience comes with associated risks: Rising volumes of spam reduce email’s effectiveness and decrease productivity; Viruses, worms, and Trojans are hidden in mail attachments, causing disruptions and downtime and, in the worst cases jeopardize enterprise security and data integrity; and compliance pressures are driving awareness that inbound and outbound content must be monitored and regulated to ensure organizational security.

Unsecured mail servers are routinely hijacked by overseas spam artists, creating havoc and leaving the unaware owners liable. E-mail can also be used in denial of service type attacks, overwhelming servers with unwanted traffic.

How can a person reduce these risks?

Combating spam is made difficult by the ubiquitous nature of e-mail. Traditionally administrators have had to straddle the line between inconveniencing legitimate users and preventing exploitable loopholes for hackers. Hosted Microsoft Exchange puts an end to that stalemate, giving users convenient, easy to use e-mail while stopping 94% of spam in its tracks.

With Microsoft Exchange 2007 hosted on our multi-million dollar infrastructure businesses can finally say goodbye to unreliable email, SPAM and the hassles of licenses. Hosted Exchange is the equivalent of a gated community for your company e-mail. Onsite administrators update spam filters and definitions regularly. Spam is quarantined and eliminated before it reaches employees. Viruses and other malicious software are scanned and intercepted before they can spread to company computers.

With a 100% uptime guarantee, Free Postini Anti-Spam and support for all mobile devices, employees can connect anytime, anywhere and send & receive email, share calendars and much more.

Exchange Server 2007 can use integrated anti-spam features for the Hub Transport Server role and the Edge Transport Server role. You must activate the anti-spam features on a Hub Transport Server via the Exchange Management Shell (EMS).

Outlook Web Access (OWA) is also secured by default. As any other Exchange client service, Outlook Web Access is also secured with a self signed certificate and the HTTPS access is activated by default. Exchange Server 2007 Outlook Web Access provides some additional security settings. Some of these security settings are part of the additional Outlook Web Access security package which was first introduced with Exchange Server 2003. Most settings of this tool (and some additional ones) are now available natively in Exchange Server 2007. Exchange Server 2007 provides this additional security features:

* Outlook Web Access segmentation
* Outlook Web Access Full feature client and light version
* Restrict access to Outlook Web Access for specific users
* Customizing Microsoft Office Sharepoint Integration
* Controlling Direct Access to file Server shares
* Block access for specific file types

Exchange Server 2007 provides the following anti-spam features:

* Aggregation of Outlook Junk E-mail Filter Lists
* IP Reputation Service
* Sender reputation
* Sender ID
* Recipient filtering
* Spam quarantine
* Content filtering
* Connection filtering
* SMTP Tarpitting

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