Invisible to the user.
Over the years the volume of spam emails has risen to a point where it now constitutes 90 percent of all email traffic.
Throughout the mid to late 00’s many affordable spam solutions rose to prominence however these were either only affordable by enterprise organisations or simply too complicated for SMBs to grasp. Over the last few years spam protection has become simpler. For many organisations spam filtering requires paying for another piece of software or another hosted service.
With Office 365 (and its predecessor BPOS) Microsoft included an anti-spam and anti-virus engine for email known as Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE). There is no additional cost for this service, and it is extremely powerful.
From an end-user perspective the service is not even visible. There are no emails generated by the system to tell them that mail has been held in quarantine or rejected, no alerts, nothing – except for some amazing interaction between FOPE and Outlook. When a message is suspected to be a spam email a tag is attached which routes the email directly to the “Junk E-mail” folder in Outlook. It is then up to the user’s discretion to delete it or mark it as safe.
Fellow Microsoft expert Jorge Diaz has written a great article covering the functionality of FOPE, how it works and what it means for customers.
Loryan Strant is a Microsoft Office 365 MVP (Most Valuable Professional). Follow him on Twitter @TheCloudMouth.
