For the past couple of days I have been struggling with our Exchange 2007 implementation. But I am glad to say that all things are looking good and we can now send and receive mail! Whoo Hoo…..

What I have been playing with is the Edge Server and the new improved Anti Spam features that it brings to the table. Which for us is a reason in itself to implement an Exchange 2007 Mail system. But what has been frustrating is the fact that it did not seem to be working! But Yesterday we had a massive breakthrough.

The setup that I had was the Edge Server is sitting behind our ISA 2006 firewall which is forwarding all SMTP Traffic to the Edge Server. But it wouldn’t work unless we had “Request Appear to come from the ISA Server computer” selected and the ISA Server Computer’s Ip Address in the “Allowed IP List” on the Edge Server. Now that was no good because then all the mail appeared to be coing from the ISA box and not the origional client.

So….What I did was I changed the gateway of the Edge Server to the ISA 2006 box and then changed the “Request Appear to come from the ISA Server computer” to “Request Appear to come from the origional client” in the SMTP Publishing Rule and BINGO the Edge Server is doing it’s Anti Spamming Job!

The downside to that was that we now could not send any mail. Because the ISA box is in our DMZ we could get out. So after subscribing the Edge Server to Active Directory and the Organization it automatically creates Send and Receive Connectors. So what I did was change the “Source Server” from the Edge Server (which had a gateway of the ISA box) to our CAS (Client Access Server) which was also running the Hub Transprt Role. Our CAS Server had a different gateway and could send mail out. We now have a working model. And what is more important the new SPAM agent on the Edge Server is working a treat!!!!

Daniel
Creating a Working Exchange 2007 Infrastructure.