WinDeveloper's IMF Tune v3.0 released

I am a big fan of the Exchange 2003 SP2 Intelligent Message Filter. It is *free* and *easy* to configure. For small and medium sized businesses that don't want to invest in separate SMTP message hygiene systems or perimeter SMTP gateways, it is a good solution. I find that the IMF reduces about 95% of the spam I receive in my Inbox. 95% is a good percentage for a free spam filter. I usually configure it to block anything with an SCL of 7 or higher and put anything with an SCL of 5 or higher in my Junk E-mail folder.

However, the IMF is just not very tune-able. That is why I like WinDeveloper's IMF Tune software. They just released a new IMF Tune version (v3.0) that has a lot of nice improvements such as log management, improved e-mail archiving, keyword reporting, and additional SCL rules. IMF Tune includes whitelisting and blacklisting features that ust are not availble via the IMF by itself. And at $148.00 for a single server, IMF Tune is dirt cheap and gives you features that you find in software costing thousands of dollars. Here are some features from the IMF Tune web site.

• Whitelisting - Scan IPs, senders, recipients, subjects, email headers and bodies to ensure legitimate emails are not classified as spam.
• Blacklisting - Scan IPs, senders, recipients, subjects, email headers and bodies to eliminate spam that still manages to reach the inbox.
• Keyword-to-SCL Mappings - Search for keywords within email headers to further control SCL ratings. On finding a match the current SCL can be incremented, decremented, or fixed to any SCL value.
• Plug any Anti-Spam Filter into Exchange - Integrate anti-spam filters running on any platform, dedicated firewall appliance or external service provider.
• SCL to Subject/Header Insertion - Expose SCL ratings to the end-recipients. Junk email may than be sorted by SCL enabling more effective verification.
• Spam Rerouting to a Central Mailbox or Public Folder - Retain all emails within a single repository. Eliminates external archiving and enables access to filtered spam through Outlook.
• Auto-Reply to Filtered Emails - Streamline the process of identifying false positives for emails most at risk of incorrect classification.
• Attachment Stripping - Minimize resource wastage within archives and Junk Email folders.
• Detailed Logging - Retain an index of processed emails and extract IPs, addresses and keywords for whitelisting/blacklisting.
• Intuitive SCL Based User Interface - Visualize the configuration at a single glance. This is achieved through the use of different icons and SCL handling color coding.
• SCL Threshold Fine Tuning - Categorize logs and archives by SCL to quickly analyze the impact of the current thresholds and adjust them as appropriate.

If you have a separate SMTP filtering running somewhere in your organization, but would like to just tag the message and send to the IMF for further processing, it can also intercept other SMTP message hygiene system's tags and process the message. This can be done based on information in the message header (such as X headers) or text that is found in the subject line.