Fasthosts Exchange Hosting Public Folders: A Bit Too Public

Posted by robbiebow on 10 July, 2006 under geek | Read the First Comment

We recently opted to use www.fasthosts.co.uk hosted Exchange Server for our email requirements at work. Price, support and features are generally very good. However, there’s one drawback to be aware of in case you’re thinking of doing the same (or already are). That is, top level Public Folders* are not made private to the domains they belong to. You cannot even set user access levels manually. Whatever top level Public Folders you have are visible to any other Fastshosts customer on the same server. They are only visible if you use IMAP to connect to the server, but visible they are.
Much remonstration with the tech support later and they stuck to their guns: allowing us to secure access to Public Folders at the top level to our own users only was not part of the standard installation. The workaround was to create sub folders under the top level. User access can be set at this level.
Quite why Fasthosts think it necessary to stop customers from using the top level safely and securely, I don’t know. They don’t appear to make it public knowledge (can’t find anything on their support pages) that putting your Contact list in Public Folders > Contacts will make that list viewable by any other customer using the same server, so I suspect many customers will have done so without knowing. You have been warned…

* Top level Public Folders in this context are the folders found immediately under the domain in the Public Folders tree