New release of Forefront Online Protection for Exchange

This week we released an update to Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) - our hosted service providing anti-malware and anti-spam for both on-premises Exchange and Exchange Online.  FOPE can be used as an alternative to the new Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server, or in tandem with it for messaging defense-in-depth.

The new release of Forefront Online Protection for Exchange offers enhanced policy control capabilities (such as enhanced regular expressions support, custom dictionaries) for IT admins to more effectively adhere to compliance needs. In addition, it supports advanced globalization/localization by supporting 13 languages in the Admin Console, in documentation and via telephone support. These enhancements were a direct result of feedback from Forefront Online Protection for Exchange customers, who expressed a need for more options when they created custom company policy rules for filtering, and more flexibility to manage these rules.

Additional enhancements with the new release:

· Policy rule syntax options: The new release provides the option to use either a basic syntax, which is a mixture of comma-separated values (CSV) and simple string-wildcard syntax or Regular Expressions.

· New Policy Rules e-mail header match option: FOPE now allows you to match e-mails based on e-mail header name and value.

· More flexibility for outbound forced TLS rules: The Policy Rules editor now offers a check box to enable Opportunistic TLS for recipients not specifically identified by the policy rule. Custom policy rules filters now feature the following enhancements:

The ability to upload dictionaries of custom-created lists or content for use in policy rules

The ability to apply the dictionaries across multiple rules and domains