Exchange 2010 Email Moderation

Exchange 2010 has a new feature called email moderation which I find very useful. Say you have a helpdesk mailbox in your enterprise that users email with problems they are having. Sometimes these users may not provide enough details, or not be specific enough around the issue. You may want to employ someone or multiple people to review the users requests to ensure they have provided enough information before the email reaches the service desk. This is when email moderation comes in. Note you can also configure email moderation on distribution and security groups!

To be able to use this email moderation feature users will need to be running Outlook 2010 or Outlook Web Access 2010.

With Email Moderation, emails are delivered to a Arbitration Mailbox, before being passed onto the moderated group or maillbox. This mailbox is like a holding tank for messages that are under review by moderators.

Moderators have three options for a decision:
• Approve
• Reject
• Reject with comments

If messages are rejected, the exchange server sends an email to the user letting them know, and provides them with the reason if given.

I can see this feature very useful in the business world that does not already have systems like this in place.

Delivery restrictions on mailboxes and groups have not gone anywhere in exchange 2010, so you can still specify which user accounts, authenticated users, everyone, or a particular group in your organisation, who has writes to send mail to a particular mailbox or distribution group has not gone anywhere - so dont think this new feature has removed any of the previous features.