Managing Your Email Content, Part 2

Content management is a broader concept than antivirus scanning. The term includes managing the flow of email content between and within organizations. For example, content-management software lets you screen email messages for sexist, racist, or obscene language that violates your company policy. Such software also can alert you when messages or attachments contain proprietary information that you don't want to leave your company. In addition, content-management methods can protect your organization from spam.

In "Managing Your Email Content, Part 1," June 2001, I discuss content management in Exchange Server 5.5, vendors' add-in applications, and a content-management scenario. In this article, I look at

• Exchange 2000 Server's native content-management functionality
• updates to the Virus Scanning API (VS API) in Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1 (SP1)
• using the Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server to control email

Exchange 2000 Methods
Exchange 2000 provides some built-in methods for controlling unwanted email—from filtering messages based on content to using reverse DNS lookups to verify senders. You can use built-in filtering to prevent specific senders from sending email messages to your servers. Note that the ability to use filtering on SMTP senders doesn't exist in the Windows 2000 SMTP service, only in the Exchange 2000 SMTP service. (For information about SMTP security in Exchange Server 5.5, see Joseph Neubauer, "Is Your Exchange Server Relay-Secure?" January 2000.) . . .