Postini experiences

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From: Lindsley Williams <LWilliamshis.com> To: "Adam C. Engst" <acetidbits.com>

I have been a Postini "beneficiary" for over a year in my main mail system, and a month at my office.

Some observations, with hopes your forum can leverage them to more fully develop what is the core of a good system:

For reasons I can't figure out, I still get plenty of ads for cheap viagra and organ expanding devices or ingestibles. While many are trapped, a goodly number manage to get through, seemingly identical in style and content to others that are properly trapped.

When a suspicious mail is detected but you want it, users have the option of adding that specific address to a roster of good addresses, allowing them to reach you no matter what the content thereafter. But, if you want the whole domain to be allowed, you can't specify that when the individual item of mail is at the "allow" stage. EASY FIX, methinks.

The Postini system has only a limited capacity to accept good addresses/domains and, I suspect, the bad ones too. I have bumped up against that limit and have had to cull the list of addresses/domains to overcome this. EASY FIX, methinks (storage being cheaper these days).

At the other end, one can also add specific addresses or whole domains to trap side, which stops one or all as the case may be. But, there is not but should be, an option to send such items directly to the trash without review. EASY FIX, methinks.

The sort options do not allow a sort on the domain from which mail is sent, an option that would allow users to see where the crud they get that is trapped is coming from globally -- or the stuff that they want either for that matter. Perhaps not easy, but NOT TOUGH either.

When users have several Postini accounts, the accumulated savvy of one account cannot be copied into the other; Postini #2 must learn step by step all over. MIGHT be more complex.

Aside from this, in light of recent Boston court decision about privacy of email, I would wonder if both ISPs and Postini should now re-organize themselves into a virtual condominium wherein users would be the owners of the hardware on which messages to (or from) them pass en route to you or others (send/receive) are stored even for a short period of time. If users owned their email storage, it would be harder for others to legally pry without a search warrant.

I think you will find Postini positive, but not perfect.

-- Lindsley Williams / LWilliamshis.com

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my isp, softcom.net, implemented postini... approaching 2 years now. and i have been forever thankful for it. it has stopped the vast majority of spam from reaching my inbox. would say upwards to 99% of spam has been stopped. it also does virus/trojan/worm checking, and has stopped virtually all viruses from reaching me. the web interface postini provides, for rooting through the spam, is also pretty easy to use. do have to be careful, since a few legitimate emails are also filtered, from time to time; but it is easy enough to whitelist email addresses that i want to receive. overall, it's been a blessing.

thanks for publishing tidbits, it's an irreplaceable source of mac news!!

michael hallsted

--

Michael Lawrence Hallsted home: mailto:michaelhallsted.com http://www.hallsted.com/index.html mailto:mikey719softcom.net http://www.softcom.net/users/mikey719/index.html work: mailto:webmasterjfmco.com http://www.jfmco.com/index.html Registered Linux user #295152 with the Linux Counter Project http://counter.li.org. "It said to use Windows XP or better, so I bought an Apple Macintosh with osX."

John sent this to me before we switched, but I thought it was still
relevant for this thread.

cheers... -Adam

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From: John O'Fallon <johnmaxum.com>

I thought I'd drop you a note about spam filtering. Like you (I
imagine), for years I ran my own mail server and dealt with spam
myself. I did this because, as a server software guy, I figured I
should know how to manage the same services my customers use. But a
few months ago, I finally set up an account with our mutual friends
at Digital Forest, and rely on their mail service now.

As you may know, they use Communigate, which works great and has
caused no problems at all. What I have really come to love, though,
is the spam filtering service Digital Forest uses, Postini. You've
no doubt heard of Postini, but I thought I'd mention it for a couple
of reasons.

First and foremost, it works great. I was getting 500 to 700 spam
messages a day (it sounds like I was a bit shy of your numbers). Now,
I get maybe 10. And I have yet to spot a message in Postini's
quarantine that was incorrectly filtered. I haven't been as diligent
as I should be about checking the quarantine, but still, in the
thousands of blocked e-mails I have scanned, none were messages that
should clearly have been let through. A couple of opt-in mailing
lists (for example, the weekly "Cigars International" specials
mailing) did get blocked, but you would expect that, and it was easy
to tell Postini to stop filtering messages from those domains.

If you think about it, having a central service scanning for spam for
hundreds (actually, thousands, I'm sure) of mail servers makes a ton
of sense. Not only do you save the effort associated with scaling a
single solution to thousands of mail servers, but automated spam
recognition is actually easier. I didn't write the Postini software,
but I would think that one of the spam recognition techniques they
use is to look for messages repeated across many of their client's
servers. Plus, once a certain mail message has been identified as
spam, it is certainly easier to yank it from other accounts when it
is found.

Finally, Postini works with the server, before my mail package
accesses my mail, so I'm not stuck downloading all of those messages
any more. All the spam filtering magic happens upstream, on Digital
Forest's high-speed 'net connection and fast mail server.

Sorry to be so long-winded, but I know spam is a problem near and
dear to your heart. A few months ago, I was having a sizable chunk
of my day wasted by spam, and had gotten to the point where it was
the single biggest problem in my work. Postini has reduced the
problem to a minor annoyance, and it costs a few bucks a month.

John

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From: Lee Lukehart <leelifescope.net>

I wanted to offer some feedback as a Postini user, and point out a
limitation that may not be immediately obvious. The latter first,
which is that its white list size is limited to 4KB. One can white
list an email address by domain, but that's not practicable for email
host sites like Hotmail, Yahoo, and MSN. And if one subscribes to a
number of newslists, and buys frequently via the web, that precious
space quickly gets consumed. From my inquiries (through my ISP,
Netgate.net), Postini will provide no option to raise that cap.

My second comment, is that after a year of using Postini, I still
must scan caught mail (weekly, about 3500 items) for legitimate
messages since some still get caught (customer messages are
especially prone). I accept it as overhead of dealing with the
scourge--but I still don't like it. I'd prefer if I could designate a
TO: address that would send everything through. [Darn if they didn't
JUST add this feature--yea!]

Lastly, I'm observing an increase in spam that spoofs trusted
addresses (including my own).

BTW, I'm a long-time reader of TidBITS--great job! Which reminds me,
I need to re-up a donation to you guys!

Best regards,

Lee Lukehart

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From: Chuck Hathaway <mengraphsaber.net>

Some feed back on Postini . . .

I have had Postini for better than a year now and have found that the
Spam that gets through dropped from approximately 120 to a high of
180 a day down to 3, 4 or 5 a day.

At first I was checking and clearing my Message Center daily and now
I do it every two to 3 days just to make sure no one has fallen
through that cracks.

Every once in a while I find someone but the difference is well worth it.

Good Luck . . . Your volume is way more than mine but I think that
ultimately you will be pleased.

Chuck
mengraphsaber.net

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From: "Spencer M. Lovette" <slovettecomputer.net>

Hi Adam,

My ISP, <>computer.net, has provide Postini for over 2 years. I am
very pleased with the performance. I'm afraid I don't have long term
statistics, but on 7/5 it filtered out 150 messages and let through 3
junk messages. That's typical.

Initially I checked the filtered list frequently for false positive.
Early on I waived a monthly newsletter I subscribed to. Since then I
don't recall having missed anything I expected. Infrequent checks
have never turned up a another false positive.

I hope you are as pleased as I am. Bye the way, another benefit; when
I don't want to deal with e-mail someone sends me or if I forget to
respond to something, I can always blame the filter for preventing me
from receiving their important message. You know how finicky this
technology can be ;-) .

Thanks for the great info.

Best regards,

Spencer Lovette

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From: David Emme <demmepobox.com>

My ISP ("The River" in Tucson, AZ) provides Postini. I've been using
it for a little over a year, and love it. I only get about 100 spams
on the average day, but once I got Postini set up with my personal
"whitelist" of commercial senders, email lists, etc. it has worked
flawlessly. I do get an occasional spam passed thru to me (typically
a very short message with nearly every word intentionally misspelled,
plus a long paragraph of random words). In that case I simply forward
the spam spampostini.com so that they can enhance their filters.

I hope your experience is as positive as mine.

Upon rereading the above, I should mention, although I'm sure you
know this by now, that you don't have to "whitelist" *all* the
senders from whom you expect mail. But the whitelist is typically
useful to keep Postini from intercepting, for example, certain
commercial emails which you want to receive, from companies with whom
you do business.

-Dave
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