My company has decided to go the "free" route, and only implement the anti-spam available in Exchange 2010. I ran into the problem that I could not just add a single email address to a whitelist to allow it to be passed through, as there is no such whitelist available in any of the spam options. Until, I found out that I could use a Transport Rule to jerry-rig the system. I got it up and running easily, but I ran into a problem; it only works some of the time!
I used my Gmail account as a test since all Gmail gets quarantined. My messages would keep getting sent to the quarantined mailbox, even though my address was properly setup in the Transport Rule and it was shown as being enabled. I wondered if maybe the services just needed to be restarted, so I went ahead and manually restarted every single Exchange service running. Still, my test messages kept getting pulled into quarantine. Then I had someone send a message to my Gmail, and I needed to forward it to a coworker. I was expecting to have to pull it out of the quarantine mailbox, but it went straight through! I utilized the Pipeline Tracing (which I had enabled during all of this); and sure enough the Transport Rule was not being used during any of my test messages, yet it was used during my forwarded message. Just for sh**s and giggles, I decided to send another test message since the rule seemed to be working all of the sudden. Psych! It went straight to the quarantine mailbox again... What is going on, and how do I get the Transport Rule to work ALL of the time (not just with a forwarded message)?!
Thanks in advance!