Having used a number of products Appliances, Software and hosted solutions
I'd have to say that in my opinion Postini falls right in line with the
Symantec products. Sort of like using a sock for a c0nd0m
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Gurtz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "MS-Exchange Admin Issues" <exchangelist@lyris.sunbelt-software.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 11:26 AM
Subject: RE: Why not?
I’m really interested in knowing why most folks (that aren’t using in-
house AS/AV solutions) haven’t moved to Google/Postini for your AS/AV?
At 0.25 USD per month per address, it’s almost an order of magnitude
cheaper than any other enterprise solution available.
A short time before the acquisition we looked at Postini (basically the
best of breed managed provider) as well as in-house appliances. We did
not consider host-based solutions. As the astute will notice, we went
with an appliance.
At a quarter USD per user, they have dropped their cost by nearly 50%
since we were quoted. At this new cost they are nearly a fifth of what we
pay in ongoing support costs for our appliance. I'm not sure what this
$.25 comes with, but ours is not only anti-spam, but also licenses 3rd
party AV as well as Virus outbreak filters so the cost differential may
not be so bad.
Why are we willing to pay so much more? Mostly for a variety of technical
reasons (loss of control, ease of troubleshooting, some outscatter
concerns). The one major non-technical reason is that of reputation. We
checked with a number of existing customers of our appliance and they were
not only unanimously supportive, but nearly all of them were close to
ecstatic about how easy it was to manage and the device's performance in
terms of % FP/FN. I can corroborate that; we see *no* spam in our inboxes
and FP has been extremely minimal and fixable. It's almost surreal.
Postini can't match that. I belong to a mailing list that's behind
Postini and it gets spam.
FWIW, my opinion of Postini has not changed since the Google acquisition;
they are the only hosted AS/AV gateway I would recommend anyone. I think
some of the "monitoring" worries are a little overblown unless shops are
under HIPPA/SOX. I still consider them best of breed, but nonetheless
ultimately useful only for smaller shops and/or shops with little in-house
SMTP technical ability. The HIPPA/SOX shops are too big for a hosted
service anyway.
What would be excellent is if Google would start filtering their
*outbound* Gmail through Postini... They are the current 419er
spam-haven. Or, they could simply list the originating IP in the headers
like every other freemail provider does. Do no evil my ass.
~JasonG
--
~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~
~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~
~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
