Migrating anti-spam settings for Exchange 2003

Currently, Microsoft offers a tool called anti-spam Migration Tool to install ad filtering settings from Exchange Server 2003 into the Exchange Server 2007 deployment. This is good news for Exchange administrators-because when you redeploy, you will not lose all the anti-spam configurations you have carefully customized!

Microsoft's Anti-Spam Migration Tool reads anti-spam settings from an installed, given Exchange 2003 Active Directory (AD) instance, and then converts those settings to PowerShell scripts. When this script runs on the Exchange 2007 Edge Transprot server or hub Transprot server, the anti-spam settings are rebuilt.

To get these settings, you do not have to run this program on the same machine that has Exchange 2003 installed. You only need to run it on a machine that communicates with the Active Directory.

You also need to run under an account with the following permissions:

Read permission with the AD configuration container

There is read access to the MSExchange.UCEContentFilter.xml file in the Exchange 2003 server. This file is located in the \program Files\Exchsvr\Bin\MSCFV2 directory. For example, you can transplant user words and phrases that were previously added to this file.

Note that sometimes the easiest way to access the top two content is to run the program directly on the Exchange 2003 server.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Anti-Spam Migration Tool as much as possible to transplant all your Exchange 2003 ad filtering settings, but there are some things that are completely unsupported. For example, the "Archive Filtered Messages" (Save filter messages) option will not be converted because this option is not supported by Exchange 2007. Similarly, the settings for Drop connection if address matches filter (disconnect if the addresses match the filter) cannot be converted.

You can see the documentation included in this program for more information. It not only records which anti-spam settings are ported, but also describes how they are mapped to a new Exchange Server 2007 installation.