The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool is a new analysis
tool for administrators to use to check their Exchange deployment.
It will identify problem areas and generate a report listing the
problems as well as other configuration information. ExBPA reads the
configuration data from the Active Directory, the registry, the IIS
metabase, perfmon, WMI, and other files, checking over 1200 settings
against some 1000 rules. ExBPA can be installed on any workstation
running Windows 2000 or Windows XP and retrieves information from
Exchange 2003, Exchange 2000 or Exchange 5.5. Note that while less
information is available when you use the older versions of
Exchange, it provides administrators with enough information to make
it worthwhile to use.
ExBPA uses an XML configuration file that tells it exactly what
settings to look for and what rules to use to analyze them. For at
least the first few months, Microsoft expects to update the
configuration file every few weeks and to insure the configuration
file is up-to-date, ExBPA checks the web for the latest version of
the configuration file each time you use it. If a newer
configuration file is found, it's downloaded automatically.
ExBPA uses the Active Directory to discover your deployment
topography and access each server. The default settings will scan an
entire organization or you can configure it to scan just a subset of
servers, or only one specific server. The tool does use a lot of CPU
and memory on the machine it's running on when it's analyzing a
large organization and preparing the reports, but it should not
affect system and network performance, so the administrator can use
it at any time. It takes a few minutes per server to complete a
scan, generating about a megabyte of data per server. In a small
organization, the network is completely scanned within minutes, but
in larger organizations, ExBPA may need a couple of hours to
completely scan all of the exchange servers.
Two types of reports are generated; the first contains all of the
critical issues ExBPA discovered. A link to a web page containing
more information about the problem and how to fix it is included
with each critical issue reported. Note that many of the issues it
reports, even the critical ones, are probably not new to your
configuration and if they haven't caused problems yet they won't
need immediate attention, but you should work on correcting those
issues in the near future. The second report is in the form of a
tree view that shows the issues found as well as all of the data
that was gathered as part of the analysis, providing you with a
snapshot of an Exchange configuration. By keeping copies of these
snapshots, you can track changes to your network over time.
You can use ExBPA to do a proactive health check of an entire
deployment, allowing you to identify issues that are not yet causing
problems or you can use it when troubleshooting a specific issue.
ExBPA has the potential to eliminate the need to call PSS by
identifying the problem for you and Microsoft will eventually make
the reports a standard part of a support call, so you should take
the time to become familiar with it now.
Download the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/downloads/2003/ExBPA/default.asp
Effective earlier this week, Microsoft discontinued HTTP (WebDAV)
access to Hotmail and MSN accounts. The HTTP protocol allowed users
to download their mail using Outlook or Outlook Express in much the
same manner as an IMAP account. Unfortunately, it's also much easier
to script the WebDAV protocol than the web interface, making HTTP
access popular for use by spammers.
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"Is there a way to add a group of selected junk e-mail from the
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junk e-mail at a time?"
The short answer is simply No. The long answer is that while it
seems like a really stupid move by Microsoft not to include this
functionality, or the often requested ability to train the filter,
they have an excellent reason for not including these options.
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Following a series of Internet Explorer exploits, many security
experts recommended users switch to a different web browser and many
users took their advice, often choosing Mozilla's Firefox.
Unfortunately it doesn't work as expected with hyperlinks in email
messages. While the links open in Firefox, the File, Open dialog is
also displayed, indicating that you need to locate firefox.exe.
After you do this, clicking once on a link opens two browser
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