Exchange 2003 to gain Sender ID support

ORLANDO — Microsoft’s enterprise messaging server will gain antiphishing capabilities before the end of the year, the company said Monday. Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2, due in the fourth quarter, will feature Sender ID support, the first implementation of this e-mail authentication technology in Microsoft’s messaging and collaboration server.

The current version of Exchange Server 2003 features filtering technology called Intelligent Message Filter which analyzes messages and determines the likelihood of them being spam, or unsolicited commercial messages.

By implementing Sender ID support, Microsoft is adding antiphishing capabilities to Exchange Server, said Kim Akers, general manager of Exchange marketing, in an interview at the company’s TechEd 2005 event for IT professionals and developers.

The Sender ID Framework, developed by Microsoft and a group of partners, is a protocol designed to verify that an e-mail message originated from the domain in its address. Sender ID attempts to curb the problem of spoofing, in which an e-mail message’s real domain is masked with another domain.

Scammers use spoofing to make recipients believe an e-mail message came from a legitimate source, such as their bank or a store. Scammers do this to try to trick recipients into providing them with sensitive information, such as account numbers, passwords, and Social Security numbers, by replying to the e-mail or by clicking over from the message to a legitimate-looking Web site and entering the information there.

Another enhancement coming in Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 is a simplification of the way IT administrators grant a new employee access to an existing public folder. Until now, that process has been manually intensive, but in the new version of the product, it has been automated through the use of wizards, Akers said. Public folders can be created in Exchange Server 2003 to store messages, contacts, calendars, and documents, so that they can be access by a group of users.

Finally, Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 will raise the ceiling on the maximum storage capacity of the product’s standard edition from 16GB to 75GB, she said.