IMF – How to Whitelist Genuine Email Address
Chinese New Year is just around the corner, and my office is sending out a lot of e-card chinese new year to customers. However all the mails did not reach the customers and even to our own address. They start to complaint to me that email is not working.
Oh ya, one of my job scope is to maintain our exchange server. I log in to the exchange server and true enough, all the mails that was sent is being categorize as spam mails. 8000+ of mails are being spam listed. I re-submit the emails and finally after 10mins or so, emails was sent. But this is just a temporary solution, I need to find a permanent solution to avoid valid emails being treated as spam by IMF.
Custom weighting came to my mind. But there is an issue, my server does not have chinese language support and all the subject are in non-readable format. Even if I can add in the chinese characters in the custom weight list, if the user make changes to the subject field then emails will be treated as spam again.
IMF does not support whitelisting and if we could add the sender’s email address as whitelist, spammers might use our email to send out more spam mails, that’s a security issue…
Then I start to google around and saw a solution from Exchangepedia’s Blog. Instead of adding email address as whitelist, we will add the IP of the sender instead.
Here I will show you how to do it, we will add the IP of the sending host (my office’s fixed IP) to the connection filtering global accept list. This way, it will allow mesages from the sending host to bypass connection filtering. Means that inbound messages will be accepted even if the sending host is listed on IMF.
Open Exchange System Manager, right click Message Delivery and select properties. Under the Global Accept and Deny List Configuration, click Accept button.
Enter the IP address (in my case is my office fixed IP). You can choose Group of IP Addresses to add too.
Next we need to apply the connection filtering.
Go to Default SMTP Virtual Server, right click properties. Under the General tab, click on the Advanced… butoon.
Once you in the Advanced window, select your server’s IP and click on Edit… button.
Tick Apply Connection Filter and click OK.
By doing this, you are telling exchange the sending host is trusted and it is more effective and secure than whitelisting SMTP addresses and domains. This help solved my issue and users able to send out bulk CNY e-card to customers .
Hope this post helps others who is facing the same problem, do let me know what you think of this solution. Or is there anyway better to do it?
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Comments (3)
Try this instead: much much simpler than your method
http://www.n2comms.com/SmartIMF.html
imagineer>
Thanks for your suggestion, it’s a great product and from the screenshot I can see that you are able to whitelist email addresses. But spammers could use your email address to send out spam, does SmartIMF Manager provide IP filtering?
Anyway, I will give it a try. Thanks
Hi Dave,
I just noticed this. We are the developers of SmartIMF. I think you may be confusing whitelisting and relaying or recipient filtering. The IMF processes messages after they are accepted by your server. Spammers have no way of knowing what your whitelist is. They can use dictionary attacks if you have recipient filtering turned on and you have enabled ‘Accept mail only for Active Directory users’ – they can then cycle through a big list until they get a few positives as your SMTP server is rejecting addresses not in the AD.
SmartIMF handles the mail that arrives tagged as spam by the IMF. The ‘whitelist’ feature will release any mail you define with rules.
Email me if you have any questions!