Review: Exclaimer Mail Utilities

As of 1 January 2007 the Companies Act was amended to meet EU legislation requiring limited companies and partnerships to include their company details in business emails or risk a fine of up to £1,000.

Exclaimer Mail Utilities makes it easy for users of Microsoft Exchange to comply with that directive as well as add other disclaimers, brand and sign their messages, and a whole lot more.

The Exclaimer package is a highly scalable add-on for use with any version of the Microsoft mail server from Exchange 2000 onwards. Despite this, it’s incredibly easy to install and use and priced to appeal as much to the small business as the large enterprise.

We installed the software onto a Windows Small Business Server (SBS) running Exchange 2003, which took just a couple of minutes to complete, after which an initial configuration wizard was started automatically.

The wizard took us through the basic configuration steps required, starting with the default disclaimers which would be appended to incoming, internal and outgoing messages. Different text can be added to each of these, after which we were also asked if we wanted to configure something called journaling.

That’s where copies of messages are kept for archiving or monitoring purposes with, again, different options available depending on whether the messages are incoming, outgoing or sent internally. Finally, the wizard asked whether we would be using the optional anti-virus and anti-spam filters, these options adding £120 ex Vat each to the basic 25-user price quoted here.

Once the wizard had finished, Exclaimer started working straight away with no other changes required to either the Exchange server setup or our Outlook clients. Additional fine tuning is then possible via the Exclaimer Control Panel, from which you can also configure a range of other options.

For example, we were able to set up custom rules to apply different disclaimers depending on Active Directory group membership. Other rules can block messages or re-route them, modifying both send and receive addresses according to who sent them, the intended recipients, subject and content involved, and so on. Auto-responders can be configured using Exclaimer, plus it’s possible to add signatures, user photographs and other attachments automatically with such objects inserted dynamically using data stored in Active Directory.

Another useful feature is the ability to apply templates to format disclaimers, for example to match legislative requirements regarding font size and legibility. Templates can be used to brand messages with a preconfigured set of templates and a built-in HTML editor included as standard. There’s a rules tester that can be used to make sure your message handling rules are being applied in the way you expect without sending any real messages.

Activity logging helps keep track of what’s going on while, on large networks, you can configure Exclaimer on local Exchange servers and push configuration changes out to apply a consistent email policy across the entire network.

We found the software very easy to use with plenty of built-in help and a well-written manual. We saw no impact on performance and it’s worth noting that Exclaimer sells other Exchange add-ons to automate email archiving and compact the server message store. A Windows SBS implementation (£229 ex Vat) is available that offers a mix of all these features licensed on a per server basis.

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