Postini, no it's not a snack food

When you hear the word Postini, what do you think of?  To me it sounds like some sort of thin cracker.

Would it surprise you to learn that it's the name of a killer anti-virus and anti-spam solution?

At Granger we're running Symantec Antivirus Corp Ed on the servers and clients.  Symantec Mail Security takes care of our Exchange store and has kept us free from email born viruses.  It also has a very simple anti-spam feature...which is nothing more than using admin defined RBL lists to deny know spam addresses.  While this simple anti-spam solution has done a descent job for us in the past, about 2 months ago our influx of spam rose dramatically.  Coincidently, our renewal date for Mail Security was approaching.  So I started researching our options for something that would keep our email safe from viruses as well as spam.  Several reviews raved about this product called Postini...though I thought "what a wimpy name" I checked into it deeper. 

Soon we were signed up for their free 30 day trial.  In a nutshell, you change your MX records to all point to Postini's data centers.  They then process all your email for viruses and spam and then pass the "clean" messages on to your exchange server...all within a few milliseconds according to their literature.  Each user then gets a daily summary email from postini listing all the messages that were quarantined.  If the user sees an email they want...they simply click on the subject line which takes them to their "message center" at Postini where they can then deliver that email to their inbox as well as customize approved/denied senders and domains and adjust the agressiveness of the spam filter.  Ed and I tested it for a week and loved it.  Then I sent out a short survey to our users to identify those getting the most spam and had them test the service for a week.  Everyone said it rocked and eliminated all their spam with almost no false positives.  So we then rolled it out to the rest of our users and after a week everyone is giving it 2 thumbs way up!  It's so simple for end users to manage their own settings...I sent very minimal instructions to everyone and have had almost no questions.

If you get the enterprise version of Postini you also get "spooling."  If Postini can't contact your exchange server, it will start spooling all your email on their servers for up to a week until your server is back online.  So you get anti-virus, anti-spam, and some disaster recovery all together...and you don't have to install anything local...thus one less thing to manage/maintain on our end.  The reporting tools are also really slick...you can see macro and micro stats on just about everything.  Presently 42% of our incoming email is spam and you can drill down and see exactly which addresses are hit the hardest.  We have one person that has 96.4% of her email quarantined as spam...while others like me have less than 3%.

We're nearing the end of our 30 day trial and I'm sold on Postini.  For almost the same price as I'd pay to renew Symantec Mail Security, we're getting a way superior solution...and one we don't have to manage to boot...nice!  I like it so much that I'm getting it for my mom, wife, and myself at home.  The price is more for non-enterprise accounts, but for ~$2/month it's well worth it.

So there's my Postini review.  Though the name is wimpy, the service is killer and surprisingly affordable...especially when you factor in the cost savings of not having to managing an email virus/spam/DR solution onsite.

Comments

[Terry Chapman]

We have been using PostIni for about a year now and it is greatness! It has really cut down on workload of our staff by not filling up server with spam and chasing down email based viruses. Hope it works out for you guys as well.

[Steve]

Great review Jason! We are in the process of implementing Postini solution as a part of Google Apps, and your review helps tremendously.