Innovative Technology Weblog

This time (cause i’m lazy too) a post that is 99% pictures and 1% words.

As you all have read in Jeroen’s post SP1 is RTM today and downloadable from the Microsoft Exchange Website
In the SP1 overvieuw some of the new features are discribed, but how do they look like in the interface ?

Watch & Learn:

A Default Active Sync profile is created for Mobile use.
Now it’s possible to change the refresh interval.

Public Folder Management Console (need I say more ??

This is all for now, I realy like what I see in SP1 and for sure I’m gonna like what I did’nt see.

Have a nice 1,

Erik Luppes

P.S. The management console now works in Vista

Yesterday Microsoft signed off build 240.6 the RTM build. With this build we can now update our beloved Exchange 2007 servers. I know that my trusty Exchange Edge 2007 RTM build was dreaming of the new bits. And now its there. I know for sure that my CAS would perform ever better. And what about my Mailbox server, he will have even more muscle power now and it is already such a show off. The Hub Server will hub even better and if I’m not mistaken I have the feeling that the speech from our UM Server sounds a bit more happier, or is this just the beer talking.

Yesterday I started to upgrade our demosite servers and they just loved the new bits as you can read above.So my baby’s are spinning like a charme.

With this SP1 build we now will be able to connect our OCS to Exchange and use SCR with DPM. I know there are allot of abbreviations here but Jim sure you readers (geek’s.) know what I’m talking about.

For download see here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=44C66AD6-F185-4A1D-A9AB-473C1188954C&displaylang=en&mdc_uxref=sl

If you want to know more about the Service Pack you will find the resource here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/06cce2d7-e2f4-4468-97c6-b83c7a300efc.aspx

Have fun and I will see you again soon.

See you at Exchange 14 in Redmond

Jeroen

Postmarking is a new feature within Outlook 2007 that should help to reduce SPAM. The fight againts SPAM continues…

Many initiatives try to eliminate the SPAM problem. One of these initiatives is e-mail or domain authentication. Some examples are SPF, Sender ID, MARID and recently DKIM.

<update may 2007>
As of May 2007 a new RFC has been introduced by companies involving Yahoo, Sendmail, Cisco and PGP corporation. This new solution against spam is called DKIM (DomainKeys Indentified Mail). It involves a common approach; using a PKI infrastructure. I wonder what this is going to cost to implement? PKI is not innovative technology and encryption / decryption technology is expensive in regards to the volume of email. It is true: SPAM is usually not encrypted. So the more email you encrypt, the less SPAM you receive/send?
</update>

But why this? What are the threads? Well, it is all about abuse of e-mail adresses or domains, because of:

1. Spammers want to prevent non-deliveries on their own e-mail addresses
2. Fraudsters want to stay anonymous and delete tracks
3. Computer worms want to cause confusion or do not really care what e-mail address it abuses
4. Phishers want to fake trusted or known senders to get hold of secred information like passwords of credit card numbers

SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework” which is an open source standard. The development is initiated to secure and check the so called “sender envelope address”, better known as the mail-from address. The underlying technique is a SPF record in DNS. In short: when senders name and ip address deliver a match according to DNS the e-mail is considered authentic. This way, an IP address builts up a reputation. The receiver of the e-mail owns a crucial step in this process. It is the receiver that has to perform the check according to the SPF specs. Implementation is always part of the MTA agent.

More background information and software suppliers via: www.openspf.org or http://new.openspf.org/Implementations

Sender ID (SID) is a Microsoft development. To make use of it you must sign a licence but without fee costs. It is therfore not a GPL/GNU type of license and that of course is the main criticism towards this standard. It is actually a proposal for SPF v2. It still uses the same SPF record in DNS. Microsoft adds a PRA (purported responsible address) definition to it. Also Microsoft defined a SIDF (F for framework) on top of the technology to deliver the intelligence needed, e.g. historical information, logging, traffic analyses. Important to know is that Sendmail has adapted this standard too. Together with Exchange I think this is a strong bases for success. It is still a draft proposal. As is PRA.

More info: http://www.microsoft.com/senderid

MARID is the acronym for “MTA authentication records in DNS”. It is actually the name for an IETF workgroup. This workgroup wishes to create an open standard for SMTP authentication. It is also this workgroup that does not accept the way Microsoft delivers her SID technology to the public. At the same time they advise not to ignore this technology.

More information found on: www.ietf.org or the well known IT news sites like: www.windowsitpro.com.

Meanwhile over tens of thousands SPF registrations has been taken place. Of course it is not the holy grale of anti-spam, but it is one important counter measure that any organisation should implement. You should always prevent that your organisation appears on a black list.

Please share your experiences / ideas with SPF v1 / v2.  I look forward to your comments

- Paul

And this too:
I found it interesting to read that Microsoft in a press announcement has published that mr. Meng Weng Wong is the inventor of the SPF standard. The supporting SPF website openSPF strongly denies this fact!

ExMerge has always been a vital tool for administrators that needed to migrate large amounts of mailboxes to new Exchange hardware or new Exchange software but somehow, Microsoft decided it needed to be killed off in Exchange 2007. Many complaints followed from the Exchange community and it seems Microsoft has been listening because in the feature list for Exchange 2007 SP1 I found this tidbit:

Move Mailbox
This vital administrator tool has been beefed up to include import and export to a .pst

Even though Microsoft somehow now calls ‘Move Mailbox’ a ‘vital administrator tool’ (though it should be ‘move-mailbox’ since only the powershell cmdlet is actually quite powerful), it still means that import/export to .pst functionality will be back before the end of the year! I think that when SP1 is released, the Exchange community will make it a new worldwide holiday!