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Greetings! Welcome to Vol. 8, No. 17, 11 Dec 2003, of Exchange
Messaging Outlook, a biweekly newsletter about Microsoft Exchange
and Microsoft Outlook.
We took a little time off for the American Thanksgiving holiday,
saving up a lot of news and product releases for this, the final EMO
issue of 2003. The next issue of EMO will run January 7, 2004. Enjoy
the holidays!
And as you get ready to start the new year, don't forget to visit
our page at
http://www.slipstick.com/dev/olforms/holiday.htm for a custom
form to help you distribute 2004 company holiday information to
employees. The More Information section of that page also lists
other approaches to this common year-end task.
Today's highlights:
Regular features:
- New utilities
- Updated utilities
- Other resources
Outlook 2003 messages suspected
as spam
Long-time EMO reader Mark Smith writes from Washington, DC, about
an interesting potential issue with Outlook 2003: The latest version
of Outlook, when sending via a non-Exchange account, adds a "bad"
SMTP header that trips many spam filters.
According to Mark, Microsoft apparently had a few complaints from
people using Outlook that their machine name was "leaked" in the
Message-ID header. Instead of ignoring the complaint or making the
host name used in the Message-ID header configurable, Microsoft
chose to remove the Message-ID header.
Technically, Outlook 2003 is still RFC-compliant, if Microsoft
accepts the fact that messages sent from Outlook 2003 may be marked
as spam. Most spam filters that look at Message-ID use that as only
one of many factors weighted to determine if a particular message is
likely to be spam. Administrators may want to check the weighting
for that particular factor and lower it to avoid having too many
incoming Outlook 2003 messages marked as spam by mistake.
Mark says that, as he understands it, Microsoft's position that
they expect all mail servers to whitelist outgoing mail from Outlook
2003 users and add a Message-ID header to fill in the one that
Outlook omits. To me, that seems a bit much to ask. Why couldn't
Outlook itself add its own Message-ID header that doesn't reveal
personal or computer information?
Stay tuned. I don't think we've heard the last of this issue.
What to do with Outlook 2003 data after the beta expires
If you were using a beta copy of Office 2003 when it expired
November 30, you may need to jump through a few hoops to export and
recover your Outlook data. Once the beta version expires, it no
longer operates with full functionality. If you created a new
Personal Folders .pst file for use with Outlook 2003, you can't use
that .pst file with earlier versions of Outlook.
However, you should be able to recover the data by setting your
system clock back to November 1 (or any date before November 30) and
then exporting to a .pst file compatible with Outlook 97-2002. Start
Outlook, and use the File | New | Outlook Data File command
to create a new .pst file in the Outlook 97-2002 format. Then, use
the File | Import and Export wizard to export all your
folders, including subfolders, to that new .pst file. (You will get
a warning that possible data loss may occur when exporting from a
Unicode .pst file; ignore the warning and continue with the export.)
After the export completes, right-click the folder, and choose
Close, then shut down Outlook. The new .pst file should now be
usable in any version of Outlook.
AOL to support Outlook at last?
It's been a longtime coming, but BetaNews is reporting (http://www.betanews.com/article.php3?sid=1070617514)
that an America Online software upgrade slated for early 2004 may
allow subscribers to use their choice of email client, including
Outlook. AOL support is something Outlook users have been asking for
since, well, Outlook 97.
Exchange 2003 Intelligent Message Filter
Microsoft has announced --
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/security/imfoverview.asp
-- that its much-anticipated junk mail filter for Exchange 2003 will
be available in the first half of 2004 at a price that "has not been
finalized." (I wonder if that means not free?). The anti-spam
technology involved is based on an analysis of message
characteristics in the huge test corpus that Microsoft gets from
Hotmail users who have volunteered to classify mail as legitimate or
spam. Administrators can set separate gateway and store thresholds,
blocking some messages completely and allowing others to pass
through to users' Junk E-mail folders for further review.
Share What You Know - Take Our Exchange Survey
Slipstick Systems and Ferris Research are conducting a survey to
determine trends in Exchange management practices, and if you run a
Microsoft Exchange email system, we'd like your input. The survey
takes about six minutes to complete, and in return, we'll give you:
- A summary of the findings and recommendations. This will
include useful planning statistics such as the size of Exchange
servers, numbers of supported mailboxes, types of SANs being
used, server consolidation, and system downtime.
- An invitation to receive Ferris Research's monthly
newsletter on messaging and collaboration
- An invitation to join Ferris Research User Panel
To participate, go to
http://www.ferris.com/surveys/exchangeusers.htm.
Note: surveys must be completed by December 31, 2003; to minimize
bias, vendors of messaging and collaborative technologies are not
invited to participate.
A second news aggregator for Outlook
If you've visited our web site recently, you've probably noticed
the little orange XML button that announces that we have an RSS news
feed that you can read in any of several news aggregator
applications. Last May, NewsGator (http://www.newsgator.com)
became the first integrated news reader for Outlook, and we've been
using it a lot every day. Now there's a second Outlook aggregator,
intraVnews (http://www.intravnews.com),
and it looks great, too. The intraVnews feature that stands out is
its ability to grab any HTML page linked to a news item and store
that page in Outlook with the news item itself.
Try sharing with SharePoint for free
I've spent a lot of time recently working with the Outlook
integration features in Windows SharePoint Services, so I was
delighted to learn this week that a free 30-day trial of WSS is now
available. You can even get WSS coupled with Exchange 2003 Outlook
Web Access. Check out the trial offers at
http://www.sharepointtrial.com.
If you're not familiar with SharePoint's Outlook integration
features, these articles will help you get started:
Anti-spam Summit
Spam continues to be one of my hot-button topics, so it's
delightful to be invited to speak at the Anti-Spam Summit in San
Francisco March 17-19, 2004. I'll be talking about the role that
Outlook 2003 and other desktop tools play in an overall
spam-filtering strategy. In addition, I will be moderating a panel
discussion on new technologies featuring Ray Everett-Church from
ePrivacy Group, Karl Jacobs from Cloudmark, and Sean True from
Audiotrieve. Visit
http://www.101techstrategies.com/ for more details and to
register. |
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