Excellent Evaluations

Postini Spam Filtering

February 23rd, 2006

Like many of you who host your own email server I’ve noticed a drastic increase in the amount of spam I’ve been receiving as of late. Yes, of course I run a spam/virus checker (Spamassassin/MailScanner). Yes, I also block certain ⿿problematic” netblocks and use RBL lists. Did all of this work? Well, sort of. For it to really work acceptably it required a fair amount of server administration time on my part and as someone I know is fond of saying; “Life’s just too short for that sort of thing.”

A good friend of mine is a reseller for a mail filtering company called Postini. You may or may not have heard of them however they are regarded by some as the king of the hill of the spam filtering world. I cried on his shoulder for a while about the glut of e-turds bouncing off my server every day and the few crashes that have resulted because of it. He took pity on me and told me he’d give me a couple of months to give his service a try and I, on an impulse, decided to give it a shot.

Here’s a little background on me; I’m a hands on guy. I don’t like outsourcing something as important as email to anyone. The thought of another company being a link in my email chain would usually be enough to keep my up at night. Recent events had however completely eroded my can-do attitude. I was at the breaking point and I couldn’t deal with more missing email or a downed server.

So I bit the bullet and set my primary domain up with Postini MX records and waited. I used their control panel to add a couple of domains to my white list but that was pretty much all the intervention on my part. Slowly the spam dropped off as DNS caches started running dry. By the next day the problem had pretty much vanished. Every time I hit send and receive I was rewarded by either no mail or mail that I wanted. It was beautiful.

I then decided to explore the Postini control panel. They have a MRTG-style graph that shows how many emails have hit the server and whether they were delivered, quarantined, chucked etc. It was fairly interesting. I could run reports and see exactly what percentage of email was being delivered. My percentage was a meager 2% by the way. I could browse the quarantine section and see what the software had tagged as spam. It all was. I could also change settings for how aggressively the system treated certain categories of junk mail. Among the options are “Sexually Explicit,” “Get Rich Quick,” “Special Offers” and “Racially Insensitive.”

If Postini does have a weak link it is the system administrator control panel. Mind you, the user control panel is fine. It’s very simple and easy for the average user to add domains to the approved or blocked senders list. When you, as a reseller or web host, want to add new email accounts or domain to the system things become a little more complicated. I really wish that companies with quality software products would spend a little more time on their web interfaces. If the system administration interface had help files and a more intuitive structure I wouldn’t hesitate to give this product 5 out of 5. Fortunately once you get the hang of it it’s not too bad.

All in all this is a fantastic product that I can’t recommend enough to those drowning in spam. I’ve since put all the email accounts on my mail server on Postini and my server loads have dropped substantially. By configuring the firewall on my mail server to only accept connections on port 25 from Postini’s mail servers I’ve also closed the door on the crafty spammer who ignores MX records and connects directly with your mail server to do their dirty business.

Rating: 4/5
URL: www.postini.com
Reseller URL: www.opendoors.com

Entry Filed under: Internet Services