Getting excited for Exchange Server 2003 SP2

I’m currently sitting in an airplane on my way to Philadelphia.  My trip this week is made possible by the Exchange Team, who needed a speaker to talk about the upcoming Service Pack at an HP Exchange 2003 Academy Conference.  And since I just delivered an SP2 talk at the newly formed Minnesota Exchange Users Group, I am well prepared. 

Harold Wong was going to do it, but he couldn’t make it. 

Anyway… I’m really excited about many of the new features.  One in particular that I’m excited to try out is the Custom Weighting Feature in IMF.  This gives you the ability to create an .XML document that adds your own text and weightings for what you would consider to be spam. 

Here’s some text from the release notes:

—

Sample XML File

The following sample XML file and the table of values demonstrate how this feature can be used, and how the behavior of Intelligent Message Filter can be customized.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-16″?>

<CustomWeightEntries xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/2005/CustomWeight”&gt;

     <CustomWeightEntry Type=”BODY” Change=”1″ Text=”foo1″/>

     <CustomWeightEntry Type=”BODY” Change=”-1″ Text=”foo2″/>

     <CustomWeightEntry Type=”BODY” Change=”5″ Text=”the quick brown fox”/>

     <CustomWeightEntry Type=”BODY” Change=”-9″ Text=”über sentence”/>

     <CustomWeightEntry Type=”SUBJECT” Change=”MIN” Text=” ?????”/>

     <CustomWeightEntry Type=”BOTH” Change=”MAX” Text=”J’aime Français!”/>

</CustomWeightEntries>

—

The new version of the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF version 2.0, now included IN the service pack) will read this file as the service starts up and add your text to the text it watches for.  Very cool!

See the Custom Weighting Feature section of the Exchange Server 2003 CTP Release Notes for more information.

Oh… and there are a couple of blogs you should watch if you’re interested in more Exchange information.

One is Eileen Brown’s Weblog.  She’s an IT Pro Evangelist and Manager in the UK, and one of the top “Microsoft Bloggers”. 

The other is the Exchange Team’s Weblog: “You Had Me At EHLO…”

If you’re not watching these, or subscribing to them using RSS, you should.