Spam Kludge

So, I seem to have several clients who have one or two users (usually “Someone Important” in a corner office) who always seem to have some huge disproportional amount of spam compared to the rest of the users (seriously, like a couple of orders of magnitude). Most of the time, these thousands of messages a day (literally!) result from some of fuzzy combination of the following variables:

1. Have all sorts of weird aliases, such as info@domain.com, etc.
2. Use Exchange 5.5/2000/2003 (none on 2007 yet)
3. Use different clients to access their mail (making it difficult to quickly solve the problem via one of my favorite Outlook spam plugins, Cloudmark)
4. Have a Crackberry and/or iPhones (which beeps incessantly because of all the spam).
5. Refuse to immediately buy a real solution
6. Are almost solely responsible for the server queue with thousands of spam messages, which of course screw up Exchange’s Information Store jeopardizes the health of the mail server. (And me constantly running to the Exchange server and to type (aqadmcli and then delmsg flags=all is NOT a solution just because it “worked” last time)
7. Don’t want Linux in their organization and/or don’t have a spare server for me to throw Postfix on.

So, as long as the email sent is some sort of alias (and not their user name), you can often just kludge the following solution:

1. Create an Exchange forwarder for that alias@domain.com address
2. Setup Gmail to relay back to the internal address of the Exchange server.

Ghettofabulous, I know. But sometimes that’s how you gotta roll!

Everyone is worried about losing email in this process, but honestly, the biggest risk in this is it working so well for these VIP types that they want you to now do that hundreds of times for all the other users!