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Microsoft Recommends Removing Folder Exclusions for Exchange

March 2, 2023

If you are still running an on-premise version of Microsoft Exchange, administrators are aware that anti-virus vendors give instructions on which folders to exclude from being scanned by the A/V software. Those days are over. Bleeping Computer reports that Microsoft now says that administrators should no longer be excluding folders as it lessens the security of the server. As the post explains, “…exclusions targeting the Temporary ASP.NET Files and Inetsrv folders and the PowerShell and w3wp processes are not required since they’re no longer affecting stability or performance.” Microsoft said, “We’ve validated that removing these processes and folders doesn’t affect performance or stability when using Microsoft Defender on Exchange Server 2019 running the latest Exchange Server updates.”

This just sounds like another reason (there are so many) to ditch your on-premise Exchange server and start using Exchange Online.

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