Managing Forefront Online Protection for Exchange

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Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) is an email filtering service that can be used in conjunction with Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server. FOPE protects your messaging environment by filtering incoming email traffic before it enters your mail system. When used, FOPE receives all incoming email traffic, filters it for spam and viruses, applies custom spam filters, and then forwards the filtered email to your messaging network for additional scanning and delivery.

FPE communicates with FOPE through the FOPE Gateway. You can use the gateway to make changes to the policy settings within the FOPE service and synchronize with FPE’s antispam configurations. To deploy the FOPE Gateway settings using the FPSMC, create a policy package using the exported XML configuration file from an FPE server configured to manage FOPE and distribute that package using the Deployment job. Although you should only deploy the FOPE Gateway settings to a single FPE server in your environment, this process can be useful to save your FOPE Gateway settings in a policy in the console.

By creating and deploying a policy package, you can deploy the following FOPE Gateway settings from the FPSMC:

  • Sender Filter (Block/Allow)

  • Recipient Filter (Block/Allow)

  • IP Filter (Block/Allow)

  • Sender Domain Filter (Block/Allow)

You must specify your FOPE Gateway and FOPE Admin credentials for the policy to be applied successfully. If your FOPE Gateway uses a proxy that requires credentials, then also input the FOPE Proxy credentials when creating a policy package.

For more information about creating packages in the FPSMC, see Creating a Package.

For more information about deployment jobs, see Deployment Jobs.

For more information about the FOPE Gateway, see Using Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=202826).

Online Protection

If you are using FOPE in your organization, you can access the FOPE Admin Center from the FPSMC. In the Navigation Area, under Administration, click Online Protection to access the Online Protection work pane. From the work pane you can access four important sections of the FOPE Administration Center that you can use to monitor your email flow.

Click Online Reports to access the FOPE My Reports tab (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196244), where you will find reports you have created and saved in the FOPE Admin Center.

Click Hosted Quarantine to access the FOPE quarantine (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196245). This link takes you to the FOPE quarantine page where you can manage emails that have been quarantined by FOPE.

The Administration Center button takes you to the Information tab of the FOPE Admin Center (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196247), which acts as the FOPE home page.

The Advanced Mail Tracing button takes you to the Message Trace subtab (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196246), where you can search for a specific message, using basic information, such as the sender, recipient, date, and message ID, to obtain the status of that message.

For more information about FOPE, see the FOPE User Guide (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=193563).