Joined on 10-13-2004
Chicago, IL
Not in any way trying to endorse a product, but after dealing with spam at my agency for some time, I started to research an anti-spam product that would assist. We use MS Exchange 2003 (recipient filtering/IMF) and Symantec Mail Security for MS Exchange. IMF and Symantec Mail Security worked okay at best, but still a lot of spam got through. Utilized the Junk Mail feature in Outlook, but the spam got to the server.
I was ready to make the jump to a Barracuda Spam filter (pretty expensive) but thought I would give Postini a try. We have about 20 employees and the product has worked fantastic. We have not had one spam email come through and no legitimate email is being blocked. The nice thing (to me) is that any incoming emails are sent to Postini first and then on to your mail server. Thus, Postini handles the spam filtering and only legitimate emails are sent to the mail server. A lot of robust features (web-based admin) and advanced security which is updated on their end constantly. We pay only $2.50 a user a month which is pretty much cheaper than splurging on the Barracuda appliance and over 3 years. It also helped with bandwidth issues as you are only allowing SMTP traffic from one IP range vs the entire Internet.
I'm sure there are some who hesitate on using a third-party service, but based on our experience and the cost, its pretty affordable and does a great job.
Joined on 02-18-2004
New Hampshire
We use mailroute as a 3rd party anti-spam, anti-virus vendor. It works very similar to postini. We are very satisfied as well.
It also helped with bandwidth issues as you are only allowing SMTP traffic from one IP range vs the entire Internet.
Why is this?
Is this b/c other SMTP servers were sending you unecessary crud and you can be assured that if it's coming from Postini then it's relatively crud free?
Dear "dcomber",
It's good to heard from you that you have been researching which e-mail clients that do better job in stopping spam. The reason I am saying this is at the moment, I am a researcher and software tester for a company based in Boston named Useful Technology, and looking for beta testers. I think you are the one whom I am looking for.
If you don't mind, would you please go to the website listed below to download the software? and then tell me what you think about it, and how we can improve the product itself. Thank you in advance.
Secure Communications
Joined on 10-13-2004
Chicago, IL
Hi Rog,
I'm sorry for the open-ended sentence..what i was referring to was that before we used Postini, our MX records pointed directly to our mail server. Thus, we accepted any SMTP traffic. With Postini, your MX ranges change to Postini's and thus you only need to allow SMTP traffic from one IP range (postini's) as all email goes through them and then onto our mail server. I hope that makes sense.
Joined on 02-21-2002
TechSoup Member
I see your positive comment about Postini from FEbruary 2007. I am looking for an antispam solution for an agency also about twenty people and wonder whether your experience in the intervening yer has remained positive or whether you havfe any additional thoughts about Postini.
Thanks.
We used Postini when I worked on contract at a multi-national mfg'er. It worked as well as any anti-spam solution I've seen. The issues we typically had were foreign email, typically originating in China, that got filtered. But Postini had a nice feature for reviewing those and toggling settings so they were no longer filtered. FWIW, we had replaced our Barracudas with Postini.
Joined on 10-13-2004
Chicago, IL
We're still using Postini (over a year now) and its been fabulous. We have another 6 months on our contract with our reseller for Postini. After that, it will be handled by Google. Since the product has worked well, we were looking at the Postini archiving feature too. Here is a link to their pricing...
Pricing
It seems Google has been pretty generous with NPO pricing in the past on some of their other solutions. Has anyone heard if they will release a different model for the Postini features?
Otherwise, I'd imagine a hosted GMAIL account will offer many of the same anti-spam features as Postini does in time...
Yep, we discovered postini late... about a year ago... and it is one of those "man I wish I knew about this before" sort of things.
We love it. It accomplishes about what our POP3 email host's spam filters + well set up Outlook filters could provide BUT it does so without:
1. The hassle of setting it up on each account
2. Having to clear out your junk folder
3. Having to deal with the spam on your mobile device
I'm curious to see where Google takes this.
Joined on 04-09-2008
TechSoup Member
I used Postini for quite a long period of time. The service was quite good, but quite costy, especially if you have many users. And another drawback is that handling your business letters to someone else is a little bit uncomfortable.. Now I came to use Gafana.com. Satisfied with the service either, the price is lower and it's me who is in charge of the letters.
Joined on 07-16-2009
TechSoup Member
I am technical support for a postini reseller and would like to just clear up something that gorgeous11 wrote about being a little uncomfortable handling your business letters to someone else.
Postini is a "cloud" service which means that emails etc. is scanned as it passes through postini. Everything that your email goes through in postini is automated and has no human intervention. No email is stored on disk unless its quarantined to be reviewed by the reciever. Postini has stringent security policies that ensure that privacy is upheld.
The steps that postini takes in security goes much much further than what I have mentioned here. Rest asured that no human is woking with your email or has access to the information within.