It does it a couple of ways. FOPE has a spam engine, Exchange has a spam engine, and Outlook has a spam engine.
FOPE configuration is "stand alone" Exchange configuration allows you to define a confidence level as to whether a piece of email is spam or not and depending on that confidence level to drop the message or to send it on to Outlook. Outlook also has a spam engine. Based on the SCL it will either immediately file the message in Junk, or re-evaluate the message based on its own spam engine. Based on that evaluation it is either placed into Inbox or Junk. Exchange gets semi-regular updates directly from Microsoft. Outlook engine updates come out as patches to Outlook. From: xyz [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 9:29 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: OUTLOOK 2010 and Junk E-Mail folder question Greetings, Exchange 2010 SP2 UR 3 WIN7 Outlook 2010 clients MS hosted FOPE on our front end. I am looking into recent tickets where "apparently legitimate" emails are being moved to the Junk E-Mail folder. I ran into this myself last night doing an "external" email test and found it was put into my own Junk E-Mail folder. I checked in FOPE and found this specific email had passed all tests and was forwarded to my account. I have done a lot of reading on this and the threads focus is about how to enable or disable this feature. Hoping someone knows how the Junk E-Mail folder works, and what "source or method" it uses to "decide" what to put in the Junk E-Mail folder. Thanks for any comments. Dana --- To manage subscriptions click here: or send an email to with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist --- To manage subscriptions click here: or send an email to with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist
