Junk Mail Settings via GPO & Exchange 2010

One of my most popular blog posts is "Control Outlook 2007 Junk Mail Settings via GPO". I've used this policy and corresponding text file for nearly two years now, without any issues.

And then I upgraded the mail server to Exchange 2010 SP1.

It was reported to me (and the "interwebs" confirm) that the import and processing of the text file for the "safe senders" has a bit of a special "feature".  If you have any addresses on the list that match your internal domain, they are removed a few minutes after the import happens.  And if you manually add any internal domain addresses to the safe senders list, they disappear too.  This happens with the Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 client. 

There is quite an extensive forum posting about the issue from early 2011 that you can check out. It includes some PowerShell to adjust transport rules so that domain mail has a reduced spam level. I haven't tried that though, as this issue isn't mission critical for our office.

But if you or your end users have noticed this behavior, it isn't insanity. It's just not working the way it did with Exchange 2003.

Travel Wishlist for Calendaring and Time Zones

As the end of TechEd draws near, I’ve started looking ahead to next week on my calendar and find myself annoyed with the way time zones are handled in the applications I use to manage my schedule. I use Outlook 2007 at work, Google Calendar for my personal schedule and then sync them together with Google Sync on my BlackBerry.

I know scheduling across times zones is a necessary evil with today’s distributed workforce and it’s great that my appointments are adjusted to the proper time when I’m coordinating with people in other parts of the country. But I wish I could specify on my calendar what time zone I’d like "see" for any given range of days.

For example, an appointment that I have at 10am next Tuesday on the west coast, is going to be at 10am local time on the day I am in that time zone. Today (while in New Orleans for TechEd) if I look at that appointment it reports that it’s scheduled for noon, because my entire calendar reflects my current time zone. If someone calls me and wants to schedule something else for Tuesday, I have to convert the time zone in my head for my existing appointments before I can commit to another event on the west coast. (If everyone sent me calendar invites via email with meeting requests, this would be less of an issue, but that’s hardly realistic expectation from my dentist, for example.)

My calendar “wish" is a feature that would allow me to specify that my calendar reflect all my appointments is the Pacific time zone, unless I change a range of dates to use an alternate zone or to match the zone on my computer or mobile device. This way future appointments would be reflected in time zones that are relevant to my expected physical location at the time of the meeting, not my physically location at the time I’m looking at my calendar. Basically, it would be a little “override” feature for the way calendaring handles time zones now.

By no means have I thought out all the details of how this should work and I’ll be the first person to admit that I don’t think like a developer, but I’m gonna toss my “wish” out there into the wind. Who knows, maybe a feature in the next version of Outlook will be my idea. (Or maybe this is already possible and it's just not clear to me... either way, I want it!)

Control Outlook 2007 Junk Mail Settings via GPO

If you do a web search for setting up a Group Policy for controlling Outlook 2007 junk mail settings (specifically adding a global Safe Senders or Safe Recipients list) you'll find a ton of links, spanning several years and pointing to posts, KB articles and other blogs. This is how I got it to work for me. And yes, you still need on extra registry key that's not in the template settings.

Goal: Append a global list of "Safe Senders" to each users existing list in Outlook 2007.

Scenario: We have an Windows 2003 domain, Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2007 deployed on Windows XP.

1. Create a file called "safesenders.txt" in a shared location that is accessible to all users.


2. Access Group Policy Management Editor from a Vista or Windows 7 machine so Group Policy Preferences can be used.


3. Install the administration templates for Office 2007. (These were already in our system from when a co-worker deployed Office 2007.)


4. Create or edit a policy to control Microsoft Office or Outlook.


5. Go to "User Configuration - Policies - Administrative Templates - Classic Administrative Templates - Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 - Tools Options... - Preferences - Junk E-mail"


6. Disable "Overwrite or Append Junk Mail Import List". If you enable this policy, the users existing personal list will be overwritten with the common list. (You'd think there would be something that let's you select overwrite or append, but instead enable = overwrite, disable = append.)


7. Enable "Specify path to Safe Senders list" and include the path to your common file.
   
   


8. In the same GPO, go to "User Configuration - Preferences - Windows Settings - Registry". (You don't have to use the same GPO, but I did to keep things all together. Also, GPO processing happens faster if you have less of them overall.)


9. Create a key under "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" for "Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options\Mail" with the value of "JunkMailImportLists", dword=1

Once the policy is pushed out to your clients, you should see your additions to the safe senders in Outlook.