A tool to migrate anti-spam settings from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007

 

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 AD configuration container and read access to MSExchange.UCEContentFilter.xml. It can be run on all Exchange 2003 environments

Commonly seen error:

Make sure that account under which the tool is run has read access to MSExchange.UCEContentFilter.xml. Otherwise you will see the following error:

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

After you met the above, you should do this:

1. Download and install the tool on your Exchange 2003 system from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=805EAF35-EBB3-43D4-83E4-A4CCC7D88C10&displaylang=en
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\Exchange2007AntiSpamMigration.exe
3. Run the tool which outputs a Power Shell script "MigratedSettings.ps1" by default
4. Run the Power Shell script produced in step 1 on your Exchange 2007 Edge/Hub Transport roles and you are done

The tool (Exchange2007AntiSpamMigration.exe) reads anti-spam related settings from Active Directory, converts them to equivalent Exchange 2007 tasks and writes them to a Power Shell script. Please read the document that accompanies the tool to know which settings are migrated. It's 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

One thing to note is that for certain settings, there is no direct one to one mapping from 2003 to 2007. In that case, the tool emits a warning or tries to keep the migration as close as possible to the original settings (Example : Administrators cannot assign specific weights to custom words and phrases in 2007, but in 2003 they could. So, when migrating if a custom word has positive weight, it is converted to Influence of "BadWord" and if it has a negative weight, it is converted to Influence of "GoodWord")

In order to run this tool, you will need .NET Framework 1.1 or higher. The account under which it is run needs to have read permissions to AD configuration container and to the MSExchange.UCEContentFilter.xml file.

- Bhavin Shah