Using Exchange 2007 Header Firewall

Each time an SMTP email is passed from one server to another, the receiving server records the hand-off in the SMTP headers of the email. This is usually recorded like this:

Received: from ex01.companyabc.com (10.12.1.81) by edge.companyabc.com (12.5.1.168) with Microsoft SMTP Server id 8.1.278.0; Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:17:46 -0700

Customers often do not like their internal email infrastructure exposed in the SMTP headers for security reasons. It displays private information, such as internal IP addresses and SMTP versions that can be used by bad guys for targeted attacks. In the example above, SMTP Server id 8.1.278.0 tells me that edge.companyabc.com at public IP 12.5.1.168 is running Exchange Server 2007 SP1.

You can remove this information from the SMTP headers on Exchange 2007 using a concept called Header Firewall. This is done using the remove-adpermission cmdlet in the Exchange Management Shell. If you use Exchange 2007 Edge server(s), run the following one-liner:

Remove-ADPermission -id "EdgeSync - companyabc to Internet" -User "MS Exchange\Edge Transport Servers" -ExtendedRights Ms-Exch-Send-Headers-Routing

Note: Replace "EdgeSync - companyabc to Internet" with the name of the Internet bound send connector. You can run the Get-SendConnector cmdlet to display the names of all the Exchange send connectors.

For Exchange 2007 implementations that do not use Edge servers, use the following:

Remove-ADPermission -id "companyabc to Internet" -User "NT Authority\Anonymous Logon" -ExtendedRights Ms-Exch-Send-Headers-Routing

Again, replace "companyabc to Internet" with the name of the Internet bound send connector.

Essentially, you want to remove the rights of the last user account that will handle the outbound SMTP from reading the Ms-Exch-Send-Headers-Routing attribute in Active Directory. For Edge servers that will be the MS Exchange\Edge Transport Servers user account and for everything else it will be NT Authority\Anonymous Logon. Doing so will remove all the internal relay entries in the header before the last Exchange server, making the email appear like it originated from that last server.