Queued Messages - Microsoft Exchange

It sounds like its Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (UCE) that is getting sent
to your Organizations.
One of the stategies is to send bulk mail to a series of alias's with your
email domain name. The thinking here is that at least 1 or 2 can get through
to vaild email addresses in your organization.
The rest will NDR, postmaster then tries to send an NDR back but doesnt get
through because the sending address is a spoof address. This is why you have
undeliverable mail from the postmaster.

Its quite tough to controll this and represents an ever increasing problem
for organizations.

To assist against this you can perform a revers DNS lookup on incomming
mail. This will confirm that the sennding IP and domain name do indeed match
up after performing a reverse DNS lookup. You can enable this in ESM,
Administrative Groups, your admin group, Servers, your server, Protocols,
SMTP, properties of the Default SMTP Virtual Server, Delivery tab, Advanced
button, check the "Perform reverse DNS lookup on incomming messages"

Just bear in mind that this setting will add a performace cost on the
Exchange server.

There is more detail on this topic in the following microsoft knowledge base
article 319356.
www.microsoft.com/support

You could also investigate 3rd party gateway products. Many of these also
assist with the control of spam and UCE.

--
Regards

Dion Shing

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Please do not send email to this address, post a reply to this newsgroup.

"Michael Hewson" <mhewson@tradermade.com> wrote in message
news:OruUCUhxDHA.2328@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
> I am new to Exchange so please bear with me on this.
> I seem to be having a problem with a lot of messages in our Message Queue
on
> our Exchange server - we are running W2000AS SP3 fully patched with
Exchange
> 2000 SP2. Every day there are at least 30 messages in the queue at various
> states or retrying or queuing, all from our postmaster account. Relaying
is
> disabled and our spam filter has the NDR report feature switched off.. I
am
> unable to locate any of the original messages that our postmaster account
> appears to be responding to by matching the time they arrive on our server
> to any items in our postmaster account. The addresses appear to be from
> sites totally unrelated to our business and from places like Asia or from
> domain spaces like ".biz" or ".net".
> Why are these messages appearing in the queue and can i do anything to try
> and stop them appearing in the future. Or is this normal behaviour?
>
> Many thanks for your help.
>
> Michael
>
>