IMF: Updates stopped in December, to resume on Jan. 17th

A lot of users wondered why there were no updates to Microsoft's Intelligent Messages Filter (IMF) in recent weeks. Many Exchange administrators wondered if it was a problem with their servers when they saw IMF hadn't been updating automatically - some even posted on different Exchange forums wanting to compare the versions on their servers. (IMF updates are normally available twice a month).

Scott Roberts throws some light on this. According to his post on WSUS blog, IMF updates were blocked in December 2006. These will restart on Jan. 17th. The last published update is the one from Nov. 30th last year.

Perhaps this has something to do with Exchange Server 2007 being RTMed in early December.

I am surprised why there wasn't more information about this, and not as many users complained. Perhaps not as many users noticed, because there's no mechanism to nag you for older definitions like most anti-virus/anti-spyware agents do.

Either way, it would be great to hear about such issues from the Exchange team blog (rather than first being reported on the WSUS blog) a little earlier in the lifecycle of such incidents.

While we're still on the subject of IMF updates, it would be great to see an update to IMF that either allows you to keep the Custom Weighting file - MSExchange.UceContentFilter.xml - in the \exchsrvr\bin\MSCFV2 folder (rather than having to move/copy it to the new sub-folder created every time IMF updates are applied), or allows location of the file to be specified in a registry value.

Note: The Custom Weighting file is used to control SCL values assigned to messages using keywords found in message subject or body. Not all users use the Custom Weighting feature, introduced in Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2. More details in SP2 Release Notes.