Using Transport Rules in Exchange Server 2010 you can add fancy disclaimers to your outgoing e-mail messages.

Transport Rule information is stored in Active Directory and shared between all Hub Transport servers in the organization. This way a consistent behavior can be achieved.

To create a Transport Rule that appends a disclaimer open the Exchange Management Console, navigate to the Organization Configuration Container and select the Hub Transport Container.

In the Actions Pane, click on “New Transport Rule…” and follow the wizard.

The first is to select the Condition. For a disclaimer this will be “Sent to users that are outside the organization, or partners”. In the Rule Description field, select “outside the organization” instead of “inside the organization” which is the default.

In the Action window select the “Append disclaimer text and fallback to action if unable to apply” checkbox. In the Rule description field click on “disclaimer text” and enter the disclaimer text. To add the green ECO icon with the “do not print” text and a standard disclaimer text in HTML, you can use something like this:

I deliberately used a notepad screenshot to display this information. When putting it as text in this blog post your browser would react very erratic on the HTML code 😉

Click Next to continue.

The last step is to set exceptions. To prevent 6 identical disclaimers in the same message during a message threat (i.e. when a message is sent and answered between two recipients multiple times) you can use some text from the disclaimer in the exceptions.

Select the “except when the subject field or message body contains specific words” checkbox and click “specific words” in the Rules Description Field. These words can be something like:

“This e-mail may contain confidential and privileged material”

When the rule is processing a message and the message already contains this phrase (when the sender is replying to a previous message) the disclaimer is not appended. If you don’t want this to happen leave the exception empty.

Finish the wizard and the Transport Rule will be stored in Active Directory. Every Hub Transport Server in the entire Active Directory organization will check for Transport Rules when a message is processed, and when a message is now sent to the Internet, the disclaimer will be appended.

When a message is sent to an external recipient it will look like this: