Quick Anti-Spam Setup in Exchange 2007

By aaron.axvig, Fri, 09/12/2008 - 03:00

Sure Outlook has great spam-filtering, but what if you are relying on Outlook Web Access instead?  You will waste a lot of time moving messages to the Junk folder.  Or even consider the amount of bandwidth saved by having the server do filtering rather than the client.  Thankfully it is quite easy to setup a spam filter based on the ZEN IP blocklist provided by http://www.spamhaus.org.


  1. Install the Anti-spam components following these directions if they already aren't.
  2. Open "Exchange Management Console".
  3. Expand "Organization Configuration".
  4. Left-click "Hub Transport".
  5. Select the "Anti-spam" tab.
  6. Right-click "IP Block List Providers" and select enable.
  7. Double-click "IP Block List Providers".
  8. Go to the "Providers" tab.
  9. Click "Add".
  10. Enter your choice in the "Provider name" box (I recommended "Spamhaus Zen").
  11. Put "zen.spamhaus.org" in the "Lookup domain" box.
  12. Leave "Match any return code" checked.

The following screenshot shows pretty much all these steps:

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Doing this cut me to about 17 spams per day, rather than the ~170 I was getting.