Exchange Server EMail Routing – Accepted Domains and Send Connectors

Exchange Server (And Exchange Online) can be a little confusing at times, particularly when we're dealing with mail routing. Internal mail routes are handled almost automatically (especially if you keep all your Exchange servers in the same AD Site, which I recommend), but how do you get it to route email to mail servers *outside* your organization? This post answers all the questions you might have about how to handle Special Mail Routing cases for Exchange.

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Hardening Microsoft Solutions from Attacks

Take a minute to go over this post from Dirk-jan Mollema. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait…

Did you realize how scary that kind of attack is? As an IT guy who specializes in Exchange server and loves studying security, that article scared the snot out of me. Based on my experience with organizations of all sizes I can say with a good bit of authority that almost every Exchange organization out there is probably vulnerable to this attack.…

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Office 365 Message Encryption Setup

Office 365 Encryption with Azure Information Protection

As I mentioned in an earlier post, email encryption is a sticky thing. In a perfect world, everyone would have Opportunistic TLS enabled and all mail traffic would be automatically encrypted with STARTTLS encryption, which is a fantastic method of ensuring security of messages “in transit”. But some messages need to be encrypted “at rest” due to security policies or regulations.…

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Data Encryption – How it Works (Part 1)


I’ve decided to start a short series of posts on data encryption, which is becoming an increasingly important subject in IT as government regulations and privacy concerns demand ever increasing levels of privacy and security.

In this series, I’ll try to cover the more confusing concepts in encryption, including the three main types of encryption systems used today; Private Key encryption, Public Key Encryption, and SSL/TLS encryption.…

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Designing Infrastructure High Availability

IT people, for some reason, seem to have an affinity towards designing solutions that use “cool” features, even when those features aren’t really necessary. This tendency sometimes leads to good solutions, but a lot of times it ends up creating solutions that fall short of requirements or leave IT infrastructure with significant short-comings in any number of areas.…

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Protect Yourself from the WannaCry(pt) Ransomware

Well, this has been an exciting weekend for IT guys around the world. Two IT Security folks can say that they saved the world and a lot of people in IT had no weekend. The attack was shut down before it encrypted the world, but there’s a good chance the attack will just be changed and start over.…

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Exchange Transaction Logs – Reducing the Confusion

Exchange Transaction Logs are a commonly misunderstand facet of Exchange Server. There’s a lot of misinformation out there as well as a lot of confusing documentation. In this post, I’ll be going over the basics of Transaction Logs and explaining what they are, how they work, and, more importantly, what they are for.

What are Transaction Logs?

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Should I Switch to Office 365? A Frank Examination

The Cloud – An Explanation

As time moves on, technology moves with it, and times they are a’changin’! There have been many drastic changes in the world of IT over the years, but the most recent change, the move toward cloud computing, is probably one of the most drastic and industry redefining change to occur since the release of HTTP in the early 1990s.…

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