Boswell's Q&A
Outlook Exceptions
The Rules cache wasn't made to be broken. A better way to create e-mail filters will come with Outlook 2003.
- By Bill Boswell
- 08/26/2003
Bill: As people in my office start to build
junk e-mail filters, they worry about vendors who might get knocked down.
So, users have a tendency to add every known e-mail to their exception
list.
Many are now getting some message that their e-mail is running out of
space. I am sure it is because of an Outlook limitation but can you tell
me what the largest number of addresses can be in the exception list?
I've searched Technet but have been unable to find the answer.
I would almost like to build a server side list of all of our known contacts
and any e-mail not on the list gets knocked down. I'm assuming that would
be too large.
— John Eldred
John, Outlook has a 32K limit on the size of the Rules cache. This is
an architectural limitation and cannot be overridden with a Registry hack.
Outlook 2003, now in beta, has the same limit, but the spam-handling features
are a bit more sophisticated so you might be able to tune your spam blocking
to stay under the limit.
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As for doing all this work on the server side, I have good news for you
if you're willing to upgrade. Exchange 2003 has lots of great anti-spam
features, including the ability to build server-side filters. The filters
can block incoming messages from open relays and known spam addresses
by downloading lists from a Real-time Blacklist (RBL) vendor. You can
also configure the list to exclude or include e-mails based on SMTP domain
or sender's IP address.
Hope this helps.
About the Author
Contributing Editor Bill Boswell, MCSE, is the principal of Bill Boswell Consulting, Inc. He's the author of Inside Windows Server 2003 and Learning Exchange Server 2003 both from Addison Wesley. Bill is also Redmond magazine's "Windows Insider" columnist and a speaker at MCP Magazine's TechMentor Conferences.