Exchange Intelligent Message Filter's custom weighting feature

Almost every third-party spam-filtering product offers some kind of custom whitelisting feature that designates a message as legitimate if specific words or phrases appear in the email body or subject line.

For instance, when I email an editor I write for, I often use the header "EDIT:" (short for "Editorial") in the subject line. That particular header acts a whitelist trigger that ensures that my messages will be automatically accepted by the receiving mail server.

What you may not realize is that Exchange Server 2003 Pack 2 (SP2) and the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) provide the same functionality through their custom weighting feature.

There is a catch though. There is no user interface for it, so you have to write a configuration file (standard XML) by hand and drop it into the same directory as the MSExchange.UceContentFilter.dll file.

Here's an example of the file to be used (as it is outlined in Microsoft's documentation for Exchange 2003 SP2; do an Edit -> Find for the "Custom Weighting Feature" section):

Each of the CustomWeightEntry entries has the following values:

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>Note that the XML file must be saved as a UTF-16 file. Also, if it's broken or malformed, Exchange IMF will not load. So you may want to either use the above example as a template or use an XML authoring tool to make sure it's correctly formatted.

About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of Windows Insight, a newsletter devoted to hints, tips, tricks, news and goodies for all flavors of Windows users.

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