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Appending Disclaimers Using Exchange 2007 Hub Transport Rules

Alexander Zammit

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Software Development Consultant. Involved in the development of various Enterprise software solutions. Today focused on Blockchain and DLT technologies.

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Exchange 2007 Hub Transport rules provide us with centralized email processing. Inserting disclaimers is one possible application. We look at how to configure this whilst exploring the functionality transport rules provide.

In case we only have one hub transport server this would be the only necessary rule action. However we need a second action in case of organizations running more than one hub transport. Since all emails must flow through a hub transport, multiple servers may be necessary to distribute load and fault tolerance. This introduces the risk of emails flowing through more than one hub transport, leading to multiple disclaimer insertions. We thus insert a custom header:

X-MY-DISCLAIMER: ready

This flags the email as processed. We will soon use this to setup an exception for excluding already processed emails. The header name and value are not important as long as these are consistent throughout the rule configuration and the header name starts with 'X-'.

Custom Header

Thus from the action list we also select 'set header with value'. We then click on the 'header' link to specify the header name as 'X-MY-DISCLAIMER' and the 'value' link to set this to 'ready'.

Custom Header Configuration

Clicking Next, the wizard moves to the Exception configuration stage. You already know how this goes. Configurations with multiple hub transports will configure an exception excluding emails with X-MY-DISCLAIMER header.

Exceptions

Select the 'except when the text specific words appear in a message header' exception. From the bottom pane click the 'specific words' link setting it to 'ready' and the 'message header' link setting it to X-MY-DISCLAIMER.

We are almost done. Move the wizard to the completion stage so that to create the rule. If at the wizard introductory step the rule was configured as enabled, emails will immediately start being stamped by the disclaimer.

Exchange Management Shell command

The completion step also provides the Exchange management shell command that was used to create the rule. We could copy this and reuse it to create the same rule at other Exchange installations. This is very handy when moving from the test environment to the live environment. Exactly the same rule can be recreated without rerunning the wizard avoiding any potential configuration differences. Of course the command would still need to be tweaked if it contained domain specific settings not applicable to the new environment.

Final Tips

This completes our disclaimer configuration. As we have seen the Rules Transport Wizard interface mimics the Outlook Rules Wizard logic rendering it immediately intuitive. Once you configure the first rule, it is easy to appreciate how the various conditions, actions and exceptions can be combined for all kind of email processing operations.

We used X-MY-DISCLAIMER for marking processed emails. A similar result was achievable through an exception that looks for the disclaimer text in the message body. This is neater as it avoids inserting the additional header. However let's consider an email conversation with many replies flowing back and forth. The exception may match the disclaimer text of an earlier reply somewhere in the middle of the email text. Some organizations require the disclaimer text to always appear right at the bottom of the email. Thus in such a case the additional header is necessary. Apart for that, the additional header is a more generic solution that you may find applicable in other rules not related to disclaimers.

User Comments - Page 1 of 1

Manish 23 Dec 2010 11:19
"if I applied the hub Transport Rule and i want to Edit the the Rule but the edit tab is not highlighted then what will be the problem"

please help
TED 19 Jan 2010 09:28
Hi,

"if emails are encrypted or digitally signed and you append a disclaimer by using transport rules then the original emails arrive as attachment to a disclaimer email "

Has anyone found a solution for this?
Sachin 29 Dec 2009 03:51
I have tried this. But the disclaimer gets attached everytime the message is replied.
I have checked the header and the X-MY-DISCLAIMER was already set to ready.

SO how did the transport processor missed this?
any ideas?
Björn 27 Feb 2009 07:06
Hi,

if emails are encrypted or digitally signed and you appand a disclaimer by using transport rules then the original emails arrive as attachment to a disclaimer email. I understand that Exchange is not allowed to change a signed email, but the solution is not ver comfortable for recipients especially not in the case for regularely encrypted email conversations.
Additionally I'm wondering why there is no option to exclude encyrypted or signed emails in the rules.

Regards,
Björn
Matthew Aylard 6 Oct 2008 05:58
One thing that confused me though is why it changes are not processed straight away after editing an existing rule. Then read the MS article about the cache and how you need to bounce the transport service on all hub transport servers. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124703(EXCHG.80).aspx
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