How to secure confidential data of your Exchange emails and protect your inbox from unwanted messages

In the world of high internet addiction, emails are essential mean of communication for most of us. It refers especially to business environment where the speed of transferred information may be fundamental for a company’s success. Numerous messages flow through the inboxes every day. Some of them are just unwanted and junk emails, while the rest of the correspondence may be of the highest importance. In fact, the electronic mail is a very convenient way of communicating with other professionals, business partners, clients, coworkers or potential employees. It also becomes quite indispensable for personal use, e.g. when doing on-line shopping, transferring money or registering on social forums, since all the confirmations, invoices and your orders details are sent to your email address. For that reason, the urgent need of keeping all the messages in the right order is well-founded. However, for a bulk email flowing via company server it is not possible to do that manually. That is why server administrators are responsible for finding a proper solution, enabling an efficient control of email coming into and out of their organization or circulating between its departments.

To qualify a program as a reliable and functional email management tool, it usually has to execute a few key actions, such as:

• Filtering content of messages, based on specified keywords to categorize them accurately;
• Rerouting selected emails according to the admin's strategy (that includes forwarding, auto-replying, blocking, etc.);
• Securing confidential information contained in emails;

All of the above functions are included in CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro that is a sophisticated email management application for Exchange 2010 / 2007. The program's filters are designed for a thorough shakeout of emails to appoint messages belonging to different categories, predefined in the built-in dictionary.

How do we work with the Sensitive content filter's dictionary and the Keywords filter?

Let's imagine a situation where you, as an admin, have to create a rule, performed in the Exchange Server, which will finally put the company mail in right order. You would like all customers' enquiries to be always forwarded to the Support department, bank details that are included in messages to be coverted, so they are not visible for unauthorized people, and finally, you want to block all the suspicious and spam-nature emails to protect employees from a constant distraction and not to waste space of their inboxes. How to do that?

The rule consists of conditions, exceptions and actions. The condition applied to emails may focus on particular phrases appearing in the messages. Hundreds of categorized words are displayed in predefined dictionaries of the Sensitive content filter that is one of the conditions available to choose in CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro (Fig.1).

Fig.1. Remove sensitive content condition in CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro.

That makes your work much easier. All you need to do now is choose an adequate category, e.g. Client Support, by checking the box next to this name and then look at the right column displayed in the Dictionary window (Fig.2). It presents a list of phrases that are related to the client support subject, e.g.: 'help required', 'question about the product', 'I have a problem with...' etc.  You can add your own phrases or set various score numbers for each phrase to give a bigger or lower value for particular words and, at the same time, to make them more or less likely to be qualified by the program as belonging to the selected category.

Fig.2. Categories predefined in dictionary.

Moreover, you can define a type of each phrase as an Exact phrase (the application searches for the exact match of the chosen phrase), Wildcard (the application searches for the phrase that can match and contain the word described in the dictionary) or Regular expression (the program searches for the matching strings of text) (Fig.3).

Fig.3. Selection of type of a new phrase.

CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro can also filter keywords entered by you when using the Keywords filter condition. This feature also allows you to define a location to search the keyword: Subject of the message, Body or both (Fig.4).

Fig.4. Adding keyword in the Keywords filter condition.

Once the email is ascribed to a particular category, an accurate action should be performed.

CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro offers many actions that can be selected and modified according to your needs. Therefore, for the messages recognized as support requests, you can use the Forward Message action.

The leak of confidential information from the company may be very troublesome for your business so it is worth to consider using the Sensitive content filter action to secure the private data. All the credit card numbers, ID details, addresses etc. can be replaced with a sequence of symbols to make them illegible for the end recipient.

The Block Message action may be applied to all the emails classified by the program to Gambling, Offensive Language, Adult Content, Spam or any other category pointed by you.

These are just examples of CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro use cases. The application offers a wide choice of actions performed on selected emails that not only ensure a proper organization of the corporate e-mail, but also deliver valuable marketing tools, such as professional email footers and signatures added to your emails or automatically attached promotional materials included in your Autoreponders (Fig.5)

Fig.5. List of actions in CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro.

The trial version of CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro is available to download from CodeTwo's website. You can check how all its features work in practice in your company’s environment by testing it free of charge during a 30-day period.