After the
configuration of IMF
Make sure you monitor
your Junk Mail folder. Test your e-mail
software (it does not necessarily have
to be Outlook) and make sure you don't
have too many false positives. If you
do, or if you see that legitimate e-mail
is deleted or treated as junk you can
always go back to the IMF configuration
screen and lower your SCL rating.
Important issues
and limitations of IMF
Here is a listing of
important issues and limitations of IMF,
things that you should consider before
deploying IMF:
-
The Intelligent
Message Filter can only be installed
on Exchange 2003.
-
IMF is a heuristic
text search engine, based upon
simple text search. Skilled spammers
have already found many tricks
around this simple filtering method,
thus making IMF obsolete even before
it came out on the market.
-
Updating IMF is a
task that needs to be done
regularly, yet currently, there is
no apparent way to do it. Even if
IMF works well for you in the
beginning, it may not work as well a
few months later, when major
spammers find their way around it.
-
IMF does not offer
any granularity necessary for
treating groups of users differently
at the server level. Settings on the
server side are the same for
everybody.
-
Although generally a
good idea, IMF may in fact cause
greater administrative effort than
before. E-mail with higher SCL
threshold will be either thrown away
or archived before the client ever
sees it, meaning that the
administrator will have to search
the central archive for false
positives, rather than just leaving
that task to the users.
-
The features of IMF
are fully available only for users
of Outlook 2003 or Outlook Web
Access, and although limited
functionality is available with
other versions of Outlook, companies
that use other third party solutions
will probably be disappointed by
it's lack of features.
-
No performance
figures are yet to be published by
Microsoft. We still need to see how
IMF affects your server performance.
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