Hi,

I've signed up for this new Postini to try to greatly reduce spam. It has been setup on my email for less than 24 hours now. So far, I've had 17 messages stopped by postini, but 45 true spam's have made it to Outlook. Does this mean postini takes a lot of work to configure properly? I did set all the controls to very aggressive. The only other choices are to add individual email addresses or domains to the blocked list. I did not think this would be very helpful since spammers change the email address that the spam comes from so often.

I've heard that Postini is great, so I would like to find out what people do to make it work better.

Thanks for any input on this.

It takes about 24 hours for Postini to REALLY kick in to full filtering. If you had SPAM still coming into Outlook after this time, I would recommend contacting Support.

OK - I'll TRY to be patient. I will follow-up tomorrow to see the improvement.

Yes, I'm thinking the same as you. Overnight, Postini grabbed 17 messages, and let 28 through, with every option set to "very aggressive."

Interesting to add that I autoforward all my mail, and Gmail correctly put every one of the 28 uncaptured messages into Spam--Postini ought to at least be able to match Gmail!

I totally agree. Why should a free service be better than something we pay for. The amount of spam received has been a problem here for a long time. I'm a reseller, and that is the main complaint that I get. From what I've heard the other free email services also have better spam control.

I'm not bashing HMS, promoting another service, spamming or anything like that. just stating a fact...

I had the same problem with spam on HMS email servers. So I recently moved all of my MX Records for my personal and business domains over to sent.com (fastmail.fm) (which i've used 5 years now) and the spam stooped as soon as the switch over was made. So I guess it shows every server is different. They have really violent spam control and it works VERY well.

I found Yahoo mail to be great... of the more than 100 spam I get daily, which Yahoo puts in my bulk email file, only 2-3 slip through (of course, I've about used up my 500 allotment of blocks). It is very rare they tag legitimate email as spam... so rare in fact I seldom bother checking. Most often, rather than having to wade through the sewer by looking, I just delete the whole bulk email file.

Although Google does have thousands of engineers, and nothing better to do with them. That is unless they are simply building their image with all these beta products. Spam classifying does tie with search ranking though. But seriously, if Postini doesn't work for me, i'll just get my money back.

OK, after giving Postini some time to learn, 51 junk messages have made it to Outlook and 26 were caught by Postini. So, that's some improvement but I would have been more impressed if it was the other way around. Is there a way to teach postini what is spam? I really don't think adding email addresses of spammers is the best thing, so what else can be done?

After finding the Postini Daily Quarantine Report blocked from autoforwaring to my Gmail account by HMS's mail servers, I decided to just move off of HMS's mail servers completely and use Gmail For My Domain. Now all of my e-mail goes straight to Gmail and gets handled by their fabulous spam filter (80 spams since last night, only one got into my inbox).

This is the much better solution for me in the long run--no more autoforwarding from the HMS servers, which had become a huge headache, with so many autoforwards getting trapped by HMS and my not knowing unless I went to my HMS inbox to check for them.

I worked on the Postini Project for HostMySite. We started work on Postini back in October and so far it has been a smooth launch, but there are probably some wrinkles to sort out. But the actual function of Postini should work as advertised. "Wrinkles" that you may find is the occasional support glitch as we learn to support a new product. We've gone to great lengths to train everyone on the product, but there will likely be something that we missed somewhere. Anyway, here are some things that you'll want to check.

If you are still getting a lot of spam after signing up for Postini, here are a few things to check

1) make sure that your MX records DO NOT have the old MX record (mail.domain.xyz that points to mailxx.safesecureweb.com)

HostMySite automatically removes the old MX records 24 hours after the domain is setup for Postini. The 24 hour delay is in place so in the event there was a mistake on Postini's end, or on HostMySite.com's end, email will not be lost.

Spammers usually hit all your MX records, ignoring the priority, so during that time when Postini is setup, but you still have your old MX, some spammers will still be hitting your mail server, thus by-passing Postini all together.

2) Check your filtering setting in Postini.

By default, the threshold is set pretty low, we didn't want to block legit email so we error on the side of caution. Each user should have gotten a "welcome to Postini" email that gives them a URL, User and password to login to Postini's message center. The default levels, with the exception of one filter, are all set to the lowest setting.

In beta testing, setting these to the middle to highest setting caught almost all spam. However, it also caught the occasional email that was not spam. This was easily fixed by either delivering via the quarantine summary emails or adding the sender/domain in the "Approved Senders" list.

Again, this is a "per user" level setting so each individual user can set their own thresholds with regards to the filters.

3) Domain aliases.

For example, if you have mydomain.com setup for postini, but you also have mydomain.net and mydomain.org as domain aliases, then those additional domains need to be setup in Postini as domain aliases to mydomain.com. There is no additional fee for adding domain aliases.

Make sure that your domain aliases are also setup for Postini. On the initial rollout, you probably were not able to add your domain aliases. We have added the ability for you to add through the Control Panel. This feature will rolled live sometime on 1/12/07.

In the early testing, we found that after 7-10 days, Postini catches 90+% of all spam. And then additional 'tweaking' makes it even more efficient. What I find as the best feature of Postini is the quarantine summary. There is no junk email box to check and so there is no worries of missing legit email. I've turned off all my SmarterMail filtering and now use Postini exclusively. My SmarterMail filters worked well, but I found that I kept wanting to tweak them as different methods of spam became popular. Postini does all that work for me and the daily report makes it easy to deliver anything that got caught.

I found stuff from my bank and credit card company got caught, so I whitelisted the domains in Postini, and since then, I have not had any false positives.

If you are forwarding to an outside account and find that HostMySite's outbound spam filtering is catching your Quarantine Summary email, just contact support. They will just need to know the FROM address of the Quarantine Summary and it can be whitelisted. It is an easy fix.

And as always, if you still feel you are not getting the performance out of the product, just contact support and describe the problem. They will be happy to investigate the issue and see what they can do to make it meet expectations.

We have Postini at work (which I pretty much ignore, because I don't get hardly any external mail), and it seems to work very well, so I wasn't really dissing Postini, just that seeing the Quarantine report get caught by your outgoing server on my autoforwarding just what finally made me realize that I needed a completely different approach to my e-mail, after a few months of missing legitimate e-mails that didn't get forwarded because of the tightness of your smtp filtering (which I don't begrudge).

I had done the items you listed in your above message, but probably just didn't give Postini the time to rev up (the 7 to 10 days that you mentioned). So I don't want to leave the impression that I thought Postini was failing, just that I decided to make my switch before waiting it out, because I had other issues beyond Postini catching/not catching Spam that I needed to fix.

Something else to consider is that spammers frequently cache MX records so they don't have to re-lookup where a domain's mail is hosted. If this happens the spammer can bypass postini, so it may be useful to setup a custom Smartermail rule that junks anything that doesn't have the Postini server IP addresses in it. You could set this up by checking the email headers of every message for

64.18.2.232

as I believe that's the IP used by postini (though I'm not 100% on that).

I just signed up for postini. Can you explain the steps on how to do this?

Well, it hasn't been a full week yet, but I am getting much less spam!!! I only check my work email once or twice over the weekend, so on Monday mornings there is usually a ton of spam to work thru. There is very little now. I'm thrilled to find this working so well.