Moderation with transport rules
Published Dec 16 2009 05:10 PM 4,289 Views

Let's say you have a business process that requires the approval of two different people. Well, with moderation and transport rules, you can automate that process with Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010.

In this example, we'll set up transport rules so that all messages with 'Project Kiwi' in the subject will be sent for the approval of two people: ej@contoso.com, then administrator@contoso.com

If we created a single transport rule with moderation as the action, and added these two recipients, the message could be approved by either ej@contoso.com or administrator@contoso.com (just like approving a message sent to a moderated group). However, in this case we want approval from both. To do that, we need to create two rules. The order in which the rules are processed specifies who has to approve the message first.

As with any transport rule, you can use any set of conditions with this kind of transport rule. For this example, I've kept it simple (just matching a string in the subject). Here are some screenshots for illustration:

Rule Summary:

Rule: Project Kiwi #1

Rule: Project Kiwi #2

As a result of these rules: when a message is sent with 'Project Kiwi' in the subject line, it will be sent for approval-first to ej@contoso.com, then to administrator@contoso.com. This notes an important behavior in moderation as a transport rule action. When the message is approved, it is processed through transport rules again, picking up where it left off in the order of rules.

In the comments below, please let us know other creative ways you use transport rules or moderation.

Thanks!

- E.J. Dyksen

6 Comments
Not applicable
I've used the transport rules to manage the emails attachment size!!
I had a scenario where i need to deny everyone in the organization to send/receive attachment size bigger than 10MB and at the same time, some senior users will still need to send up to 12MB attachments.

That was easily achieved through Transport Rules.
First, the Global Settings were set to 12MB (as well Send Connector) and i created a transport rule that will drop any email with attachment size bigger than 10MB except for the selective senior users.

Very simple :)
Not applicable
Exchange 2k7's Transport rules were my favorite new feature of 2007.  Glad to see it is being expanded upon in 2010 this much.  I cannot wait to be able to tell customers they can create moderation rules for particular domains...  so using this, you could choose to moderate anything to contoso.com if they were a "specially handled" account.  Very cool stuff.  
Not applicable
We used transport rules to strip out those annoying smart-arses who were adding x-message flags telling people to dump Outlook and switch to Pine/Linux/etc.  Worked great, and we're still getting occasional hits on this rule.
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Not applicable
aha really good information
Not applicable
The transport rules have changed a lot since exch 2007,but I would like to know how to set up correctly journaling against an external server.
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‎Dec 16 2009 05:10 PM
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