I'm looking into using Postini.com to add virus and spam scanning to my customers e-mail accounts at the server. This would scan for e-mail virus' and filter out spam at the server level so that my customers wouldn't have to deal with it at their end. Does anyone have any experience with them or with any similar services. Does it work and is $.40 per e-mail address per month sound reasonable? Thanks.

AP

We offer Postini free with all of our dial-up accounts. For the price, it's worth it (the simple amount of time it takes for our tech support staff to deal with a customer whose been hit by a virus is outrageous - providing Postini free means we no longer have to deal with virus-infected customers).

We do not offer it with our web hosting customers, though. I've yet to figure out how to really do that. With a dialup account you're talking 2 to 5 email addresses to deal with - that's basically $1 per month for Postini. With web hosting, most accounts have 10, 20, 30, 50 etc. e-mail addresses - far too expensive to offer free.

It's a good program - and if your customers are looking for spam and virus filtering, and are willing to pay extra for it, then go ahead. But I don't think you could offer it for free to web hosting customers. They'd have to pay for it.

Jason

Thanks Jason, I appreciate your advice.

AP

I think im about to try postni out and give it a test run for a month to all my customers... , and if they like it they can pay a small yearly fee for it.

It is a fantastic service though it's expensive really. Averaging on 2000 email accounts per server....hmmmmm.

Any more feedback on Postini?

Postini was a trainwreck for the ISP I used to work at. The customers hated it, stating that it filtered too much valid mail with the spam. This was an ISP with about 5k local customers and 25k nationwide customers, so the size could very well have been the downfall in conjunction with the low price drawing in many customers with basic computer skills. I think that many of them were thrown off by the Mail Trap and having to check the Mail Trap periodically.

How long ago was that ALB? According to NWFusion they are the top rated antispam solution.

http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2003/0915spambg.html

I love getting email notifications of a thread when I think "What the hell is this" and come back to find a post from 2 years ago. Makes me all warm and fuzzy.

In my opinion there are much better tools available these days. Much rather use something I had control over....

Oooh. Yeah i wondered if any of the OP's would respond :). Any suggestions on what these better tools might be?. Merak Instant Antispam gateway looks promising. IMHO

I've setup incoming mail gateways for a few ISPs, using Qmail, Qmail-Scanner and SpamAssassin it is possible to nab a good chunk of the spam, normally we just mark the subject line and it stsill goes to the end user, but now they can easily filter to their preferred folder/trashcan.

Throw in a AV scanner and you effectively stop viruses in their tracks too, this can be done free with ClamAV with great results.

For cPanel boxes install the MailScanner package from Layer1, other than that SpamAssassin is already an option for the clients.

Be sure to adjust the TOS so your clients know that AV scanning is only a first line of defence and isn't guaranteed in any way, new virus variants will get past until AV definitions are released to catch it.

Also you can basically block .pif/.bat/.scr/.etc extensions by default as well and stop some of the new stuff easy enough.

All these solutions are free and incur no ongoing costs. Oh, if you really want to cut back on spam, use the RBL lists and setup your own as well so you can keep your own lists of bad/good IPs via your own blacklist/whitelist.

Originally posted by AP
I'm looking into using Postini.com to add virus and spam scanning to my customers e-mail accounts at the server. This would scan for e-mail virus' and filter out spam at the server level so that my customers wouldn't have to deal with it at their end. Does anyone have any experience with them or with any similar services. Does it work and is $.40 per e-mail address per month sound reasonable? Thanks.

AP

I use Postini with a few of my large corporate customers (larger than 500+ e-mail users) and can't reccomend it enough.

We have also used Mailwatch (EasyLink) and SurfControl's mail filtering software and both sucked.

Sirius

I would also recommend MessageLabs.Com, If anyone is interested is learning more PM me.


Cheers

We recently implemented Postini in our offices, not yet for our customers. I would have to say overall that I am pleased.

It does trap too much mail, particularly given that it still misses some. I would be happier if it either trapped all spam and a little good or trappped most spam but no good mail. However, they send a weekly email with a link that makes it very easy to review my spam bucket. None of the mail that has been trapped has been important communications, but rather lists that I actually do want to see.

All in all I like the service and it has greatly cleaned and made the reading of email much more pleasant. I have been much less satisfied with the bayesian based solution I am using elsewhere. I also had problems with SpamAssasin and found I could not simply reroute the marked mail as it frequently marked important messages.

Aaron.

We don't meet Postini's minimum of 500 accounts so we're interested in coming in under someone else's account. Please contact me at alex@asdren.com if you're interested in reselling me some accounts.

thanks in advance,
Alex

Havent really found a solution for Anti-spam yet but we do provide customer with Spamassasin (CPanel offers it anyway), although would love to pro-actively manage it through the server through some type of add-in script to exim or something.

We added in Mailscanner with ClamAV and setup clamav to check the update servers every 8 hours... its been working great and im surprised at the amount of Viruses users and ourselves usually receive per month that have been blocked and eradicated before hitting a windows system.

Very happy with the Antivirus side of our servers but id really just like some email to be passed through some type of spam service and BLATANT spam taken out... just to reduce a little more.

im off to search :D

Anybody have exact pricing info of Postini and Messagelabs and the minimum order?