• Microsoft Exchange Server

    Block attachments with htm or html extensions and/or javascripts in Office365

    Spammers have been getting craftier with how they get through the bayesian and other heuristic filters many mail providers use to deliver only legitimate emails to recipients. One of the ways they do this is by encoding or encapsulating patterns into base64 or some other encoding mechanism. This allows the email client to render a message with text that would have been blocked by a spam filter as the filter usually can’t comprehend the encoded strings. These usually come down in the form of htm or html attachments where the email client effectively acts as a web viewer to render data to the screen. If we take a sample of…

  • cloud,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  Windows Server

    Managing Office 365 Users Using PowerShell

    Programmatically controlling the cloud is an important part of trying to reign in the chaos of disparate tools that the beancounters make us use these days. Of all the companies out there, Microsoft seems to understand this about as well as anyone and their fine programmers have provided us with a nice set of tools to manage Office 365 accounts, both in a browser (as with most cloud services) and in a shell (which is what we’ll talk about in this article). This article isn’t really about scripting PowerShell. Instead we’re just looking at a workflow that could be used to script a Student Information System, HRIS solution or another…