Any Exchange Admins have any experience with "Postini"?

[Grasshopper666]

Just curious. I received a lot of recommendations to check out Trend Micro products to scan our inbound/outbound e-mail for virus, trojan, spam, etc.

So I called Trend and left a message. Trend referred me to one of their direct resellers to learn more about the products. When the reseller called me back to talk about the TrendMicro products, he said he actually preferred a different product to handle anti spam. This product was called "Postini". Does anyone here have any experience with Postini? The way he described it, it sounded pretty cool. But he also said it should be used in conjuction with a local scanner on our Exchange 2003 server such as ScanMail by Trend.

I had never heard of Postini and just basically wanted to know if it's good or a piece or if nobody knows. We have about 250 users on 1 Exchange 2003 box.

Thanks

 

[DarkJuJu]

we use and resale a similar product called MXlogic. Basically you change your mx records to point to them and they clean the spam and virus before forwarding the messages off to your mail server. Users are able to get daily and on demand reports of any thing that was quarantined and have the option to request the mail. The biggest plus for most of our clients is that all mail traffic is filtered before it hits your network, which prevents you from getting hit by mail bombs and/or massive traffic due to mail box redirector viruses.

 

[Grasshopper666]

One of our resellers also wanted to set us up with MXLogic. It looked a lot more expensive though then our current solution so at first glance they didn't want it.

Any preferences on Postini vs MXLogic ?

 

[randal]

I have a customer who uses Postini and says they like it. Why they pay for such a service when it's very feasible to do the same thing locally, I do not know ... I guess not everybody is an IT person

 

[ronzilla]

I don't know about interfacing Postini and Exchange (we are unfortunately a Lotus shop), but we went with Postini for mail filtering about 2 years ago and have been extremely pleased.

You basically set up your DNS boxes so that your MX records for your mail domains go to Postini. They have datacenters around the country for redundancy. Then, all mail for your domain goes through them. If it passes the scan, it gets delivered to your inbound server. If it gets flagged for spam or virus, it gets held in quarantine for the user to allow or delete.

Some features that really sold me on it:
1. I can force the virus check to be on, where the users can't turn it off.
2. I can allow users to change the level of sensitivity for different types of spam to fit their own preferences. (Mine are all set higher to block more, but some users prefer them to be set lower.
3. Each user can setup his own white/black lists to either allow/deny mail from a specific sender. I know it seems like an obvious feature, but we really needed it at the time.

A couple of things I didn't realize we were getting that would have been nice to know:
1. Load balancing. I have 2 inbound mail servers that deliver to the box where users' mailboxes exist. Postini does load balancing across those servers for me.
2. Network Monitoring (to an extent). Postini pages me when my perimeter router is down or when either of my inbound mail servers are unreachable.
3. Less network traffic. Spam was a real issue for bandwidth here. With Postini (off site) vs. an on-site solution, the spam never even gets to my network.

As an additional step of avoiding spam, I've got access-list in the router only allowing SMTP from Postini's sites, so that all inbound mail *must* come through Postini before it is delivered to the mail servers here.

 

[bluegreenturtle]

I had a client last year that used postini - they liked it. It did seem to cut down the spam by about 90%. I know of several ISP's that use it too - had good things to say.

 

[Grasshopper666]

ok thanks all.

 

[ZeroBurn]

we use postini as well. i've gotten numerous compliments on the system since i implemented it, it's done a much better job at filtering out bad mail from what you actually want. they've tried several filters before that just didn't work nearly as well, the individual user customization's a big part of that i believe. you can set how agressive you want it to be.

the redundancy is great too. since mail hits their server first before it comes to you, if your mail server's down they'll spool it up until you're ready to receive. if i need to do maintenance or install a new hdd on the server for example, i can set postini to spool all the mail, shut down my server, do whatever, and turn it back on whenever i'm ready. then hit postini to unspool and boom, all my mail comes flooding back in ... it does it automatically too of course but i think it takes a couple minutes for postini to realize your server's down (at which pt will also txt msg your phone).