Microsoft now offers a utility called the Anti-Spam Migration Tool that migrates spam-filtering settings from an Exchange Server 2003 installation to an Exchange Server 2007 deployment. This is great news for Exchange administrators -- you won't lose all your carefully honed and customized antispam configuration tweaks to start over again from scratch!
The Microsoft Anti-Spam Migration Tool reads the antispam settings for a given Exchange 2003 installation from an instance of Active Directory and then converts those settings into a PowerShell script. When that script is run on an Exchange 2007 Edge Transport or Hub Transport server, the antispam settings are recreated.
You don't have to run the program on the same machine as Exchange 2003 itself to harvest the settings from Active Directory (AD) either. You just need to run it on a machine that can talk to AD.
You also need to run it under an account that has:
- Read rights to the AD configuration container.
- Read access to the MSExchange.UCEContentFilter.xml on the Exchange 2003 server, which can be found in \Program Files\Exchsvr\bin\MSCFV2) -- i.e., if you're migrating the custom words and phrases you've added to that file.
Note that sometimes the easiest way to get access to both of those things is to simply run the program on the Exchange 2003 server itself.
The Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Anti-Spam Migration Tool makes its best effort to migrate all your Exchange 2003 spam-filtering settings as-is, but some things are not supported at all. For instance, the "Archive filtered messages" option is not converted because it is not supported in Exchange 2007. The same goes for the "Drop connection if address matches filter" setting.
You'll want to take a look at the documentation included with the program for more details. It describes not only which antispam settings are migrated, but how they are "mapped" into the new Exchange Server 2007 installation.
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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