Most organizations require the insertion of disclaimer text to emails. Despite their questionable legal weight, disclaimers asserting that email content does not reflect the organization views are extremely common. Others insert disclaimers to give corporate emails a uniform professional look.

In earlier Exchange versions, disclaimers necessitated a third-party extension or custom sink. Exchange 2007 now includes this functionality. Today we have a first look at Hub Transport Rules. We use these to configure a disclaimer for all outgoing emails. Although we focus on disclaimer configuration, the discussion is applicable to the configuration of a wide array or possible transport rules.

As the name implies hub transport rules are enforced by Exchange 2007 servers running the Hub Transport role. At least one such server is necessary for Exchange to function. All emails, including internal, must flow through such a server. This makes the Hub Transport an ideal candidate for all kind of server side email processing.

We start our journey from the Exchange Management Console under Organization Configuration | Hub Transport.

From the Actions pane click New Transport Rule to start the configuration wizard. Those accustomed to the Outlook Rules Wizard will immediately feel comfortable. The logic is the same, except that transport rules are tailor made for server side processes.

The first step requires a rule name, an optional comment and the initial rule enablement status. We name this 'Outgoing Email Disclaimer' and move on.

Next we select the conditions that will identify the emails to be processed. This is done by ticking the checkbox of relevant conditions. Selected conditions are added to the bottom pane. From here these are customized by clicking on the blue links. If we wanted to add the disclaimer to all emails, we would have not selected any conditions. However we will only add a disclaimer to outgoing emails. Thus we select the conditions 'from users inside or outside the organization' and 'sent to users inside or outside the organization'.

We now configure the selected conditions so that the bottom pane reads: 'Apply rule to messages from users inside the organization and sent to users outside the organization'.

The first condition happens to be correct by default but the second needs to be changed. We do this by clicking on the second 'Inside' link. This brings up the scope selection dialog:

Change the scope to 'Outside' and click OK. The Next Wizard step takes us to the Action selection stage. This lists the set of built-in actions. From here we choose the one for appending disclaimers:

As the bottom pane shows, we can now specify the disclaimer text and also its presentation aspects such as the font and text colour. We set the text to be appended by clicking on the 'disclaimer text' link.