A tool to migrate anti-spam settings from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007
Published Mar 21 2007 02:55 PM 1,966 Views

All those Exchange administrators who wondered how they will migrate their huge list of allow/deny addresses, block list providers and blocked senders and domains – now you have a reason to smile. Exchange team has just released a tool that allows you to migrate anti-spam settings from Exchange 2003 environment to Exchange 2007 in a two step fashion.

System requirements

This tool can be run on:

  • Windows Server 2003
  • Windows Server 2000

Prerequisites

  1. .NET Framework 1.1 or higher
  2. The account under which this tool is run needs to have read rights to the Configuration container in Active Directory and read access to MSExchange.UCEContentFilter.xml. If the account under which the tool is run doesn't have read access to MSExchange.UCEContentFilter.xml, you'll see the following error:

    ERROR: Access to the path "D:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin\MSCFV2\MSExchange.UCEContentFilter.xml" is denied.

Running the Exchange 2007 Anti Spam Migration Tool

  1. Download and install Exchange 2007 Anti Spam Migration Tool on your Exchange 2003 system.
  2. Go to the folder where the files have been placed as part of the install; by default this will be under C:\Program Files\Exchange2007AntiSpamMigration.
  3. Run Exchange2007AntiSpamMigration.exe, which outputs a PowerShell script – MigratedSettings.ps1
  4. Run the MigratedSettings.ps1 script on your Exchange 2007 Edge/Hub Transport roles and you're done.

Exchange2007AntiSpamMigration.exe reads anti-spam settings from Active Directory, converts them to equivalent Exchange 2007 commands and writes them to a Shell script. Please read the document that accompanies the tool to know which settings are migrated. Its usage is as follows

Exchange2007AntiSpamMigration [/f:<full path to custom words file>] [/o:<outputfile name>] [/?]
/f: Optional full path to MSExchange.UCEContentFilter.xml file. If not specified, custom words or phrases are not migrated.
/o: Optional output file name. If not specified, output is written to MigratedSettings.ps1 in current directory.
/? Displays usage

Note: For certain settings, there's no direct one-to-one mapping from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. In such cases, the tool emits a warning or tries to keep the migration as close as possible to the original settings.
 
For example: In Exchange 2003, you can assign specific weights to custom words and phrases, which are used by the Intelligent Message Filter to assign SCL. In Exchange 2007, you can only specify a word or phrase as BadWord or GoodWord (specified as value for the Influence parameter, see Add-ContentFilterPhrase). When migrating custom words and phrases from Exchange 2003, if a custom word has positive weight, the tool converts it to a BadWord (i.e. a Content Filter phrase with Influence of BadWord) and if it has a negative weight, it's converted to a GoodWord (i.e. a Content Filter phrase with Influence of GoodWord).

Bhavin Shah

Version history
Last update:
‎Jul 01 2019 03:26 PM
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