Commencing at midnight, August 15th, 2007 we will start relaying mail using the two new subnets announced a few weeks ago. We have also provided a helpful guide to setting up IP restrictions with Exchange 2003. It is also recommended that you enforce IP restrictions on your firewall depending on your network topology.

For the entire blog post please visit the Own Web Now Blog.

Straight from the Own Web Now Blog:

ExchangeDefender v3.1 core is now live.

Over the next five days we will go through the core aspects of ExchangeDefender and all the new features. We will provide ample screenshots and feature details so you can best implement ExchangeDefender in your day-to-day email management.

Keep an eye on our blog at http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog

Today ExchangeDefender subscribers will be getting a free new feature called LiveArchive.  I am very excited about this new feature because it will allow businesses to keep using their company e-mail accounts even if their mail server isn’t accessible for some reason.  If you don’t have the ExchangeDefender service and would like to find out more about it please let me know.  I’ll be glad to send you more information and help you get setup.  It has cut the time I spend dealing with junk e-mail down to less than 5 minutes a day.

Here is a copy of the announcement on the Own Web Now Blog:

We are very excited to announce that after months of development and beta testing, ExchangeDefender LiveArchive is officially launching this Monday, August 6th, 2007.

What is LiveArchive you ask? LiveArchive is a provision for business continuity - to allow your business to stay in business and keep on communicating even if your mail server, Internet connection or other means interfere with the mail flow to your mailbox. As e-mail is being processed by ExchangeDefender it is copied to a live mail server. The original message is delivered to your corporate mail server or sits in the queue if your mail server is down. At any time you have access to the past seven days of email via secure, web based interface available from anywhere you can browse the web. The connection is secured using commerce-grade SSL, the logins and access are audited for compliance purposes and even on-disk encryption is supported.

The best part? Well, it’s free. Yes, free as in each mailbox you currently have protected by ExchangeDefender can have a LiveArchive feature enabled through the control panel at no additional cost to you. As an additional show of appreciation for our community, LiveArchive is offered free of charge to the Florida government organizations and emergency operations during the hurricane season and has been in beta testing since March.

Here is a tip from the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog about how to reduce spam by using the new postmarking feature in Outlook 2007.

Postmarking is a new part of the Outlook 2007 junk e-mail feature; it complements the existing feature set to reduce the amount of spam in your inbox.

One of the great advantages of e-mail is that it is easy and cheap to send. Unfortunately, this is the very same reason that makes it so useful to spammers as it enables them to send huge amounts of email in bulk.

Think of Postmarking as computational “postage” imposed when sending email. This is a small burden for an individual user, but is a very large burden for spammers. Spammers rely on being able to send thousands of mails per hour, and in order to be able to send spam with postmarking turned on, they would have to invest a very large amount of money to expand their computational power.

Postmarking generation is only present in Outlook 2007 and postmark validation is present in Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail , Exchange 2007, and Windows Mail in Vista.

So, how does it work?

Sending e-mail with postmark: Before messages leave your Outbox, Office Outlook 2007 stamps each message with an e-mail postmark. The postmark incorporates unique characteristics of the message, including the list of recipients and the time when the message was sent, making the postmark valid only for that message. As a result it takes a little longer for the message to leave the Outbox – however, this is not noticeable during normal day-to-day Outlook usage.

Receiving e-mail with a postmark: When a recipient e-mail application that supports Outlook e-mail postmarking receives postmarked mail, it recognizes the postmark. The postmark means that the message is most likely not spam and this is an additional factor evaluated by the junk e-mail filter when determining if an email is spam or not.

How to turn Postmarking off

To turn on/off Postmarking, use the following option in Outlook 2007:

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.

2. On the Preferences tab, under E-mail, click Junk E-mail.

3. Clear the When sending e-mail, postmark the message to help recipient e-mail programs distinguish regular e-mail from junk e-mail check box.

NOTE:  I updated the post to include a copy of the instructions (without including the screen shot at the end).  I also noticed after posting this tip that it is currently only supported within Microsoft’s e-mail software (i.e. Outlook 2007, Exchange, etc.).  That severly limits the effectiveness of this feature because there are a lot of people out there that use e-mail software that isn’t made by Microsoft.  You’re much better off using a server-based solution that works well no matter what client everyone else uses.  The solution we use ourselves, as well as resell and recommend to clients, is called ExchangeDefender.  It has cut the time we spend dealing with spam down to less than 5 minutes a day.