spam - plugin or postini?

[kujoe2002]

So I'm finding I'm spending way too much time trying to setup this spam assassin stuff on my roundcube and would like to know if anyone has used postini spam filter? It's so cheap that I feel it would be worth it for me to use the service. Thoughts?

[Nick_B]

Postini is ok. However, I don't know how it will be going forward. As contracts are up, they are rolling customers into the Google Apps platform. Not sure how that works. We bailed and went with a different provider (Mimecast). It fixed some of Postini's issues and introduced some other ones. There are obviously other providers out there as well.

I wouldn't do my own spam filtering unless I was doing it specifically to get experience in setting up spam filtering. At this point, everybody either uses hosted filtering providers or uses an appliance (like Barracuda or Cisco Ironport).

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not sure how much transitioning Postini to the Google Apps platform will change Postini. It might be largely the same. We didn't stick around to find out, though. This wasn't very clear in my initial post, and I made it sound like Postini is going away completely (which I wouldn't know for sure if is the case or not).

[kujoe2002]

Postini is ok. However, I don't know how it will be going forward. As contracts are up, they are rolling customers into the Google Apps platform. Not sure how that works. We bailed and went with a different provider (Mimecast). It fixed some of Postini's issues and introduced some other ones. There are obviously other providers out there as well.

I wouldn't do my own spam filtering unless I was doing it specifically to get experience in setting up spam filtering. At this point, everybody either uses hosted filtering providers or uses an appliance (like Barracuda or Cisco Ironport).

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not sure how much transitioning Postini to the Google Apps platform will change Postini. It might be largely the same. We didn't stick around to find out, though. This wasn't very clear in my initial post, and I made it sound like Postini is going away completely (which I wouldn't know for sure if is the case or not).

Well I'm hosting my own email (roundcube) from hostmonster.com and after having my custom email for 2+ years am getting spam for the first time. I understand google is doing away with it so does that mean I'd lose the postini services I pay for? I don't think HM offers any other spam filters services (on the server side). Also I think google is completely shutting down postini and migrating their services to something else. I dont want to buy postini services just to be told 6 months later - you're SOL.

[Nick_B]

Even when we were a Postini customer, we were just told that it would be "transitioning to the Google Apps platform." That seemed to vague, so we found a different filtering provider. I imagine they will still offer something. Postini did adequate filtering and Google Apps hosted email has adequate filtering as well. I just don't know how it will work.

I'm not sure what solutions there are for a domain with just an email or two, honestly.

[vertices]

We used to use Postini but ditched when we moved to Office 365 a couple years ago (back then it was BPOS). We recently moved the last of our clients who still run local Exchange over to Reflexion since Postini being retired. It was easy to set up and seems to work fine for them, although I don't use it personally so can't tell you too much about how good it is about filtering. So far, none of the Postini users have complained that they are now getting more spam.

With how cheap O365 is, I would just go that route for a business.

Or if you want free or if it's just a personal thing, I ditched Google Apps (due to their stance with ActivSync) and moved my personal domain for my family over to Outlook.com. Very nice experience. Great antispam, great email services with ActiveSync, unlimited accounts, and totally free. Why bother running your own email server and then needing to filter the mail? Just go to domains.live.com and sign in with a MS account. Very easy to set up.

[kujoe2002]

We used to use Postini but ditched when we moved to Office 365 a couple years ago (back then it was BPOS). We recently moved the last of our clients who still run local Exchange over to Reflexion since Postini being retired. It was easy to set up and seems to work fine for them, although I don't use it personally so can't tell you too much about how good it is about filtering. So far, none of the Postini users have complained that they are now getting more spam.

With how cheap O365 is, I would just go that route for a business.

Or if you want free or if it's just a personal thing, I ditched Google Apps (due to their stance with ActivSync) and moved my personal domain for my family over to Outlook.com. Very nice experience. Great antispam, great email services with ActiveSync, unlimited accounts, and totally free. Why bother running your own email server and then needing to filter the mail? Just go to domains.live.com and sign in with a MS account. Very easy to set up.

Due to HIPAA regulations, I am running 256bit encryption (though not required to go that high) on my current email. Do you know what level encryption live.com uses?

[vertices]

If you are bound by HIPAA you should go 365. Microsoft will even sign a HIPAA Business Associates agreement for you which most providers will not. 365 is fully HIPAA compliant. On the free stuff like outlook.com, I'm not sure of the encryption as I only use the free stuff for personal, all business is on 365.

But even then, just because you may be encrypting your client/server connection, that doesn't mean that anything beyond that is encrypted. What kind of TLS are you using? If it's opportunistic only then there is a good chance you are going server to server in the clear sometimes. You really need encryption end to end if you are sending PHI. I'm really liking sharefile.com for sending PHI.