I was looking for some info on Postini for a client recently and discovered a statement on their website telling senders not to bother them.
Postini will not make changes to its customers’ settings on behalf of a sender. If you are sending emails to a Postini customer and you believe that the Postini system has incorrectly blocked your legitimate email, you will need to contact the recipient email server administrator and ask them to change their Postini settings to allow your emails through. Postini does not work with bulk email senders to exempt email from its junk email filtering technology and does not employ a global “white list”.
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I can confirm that, when I wrote to Postini as an *individual* who had mail delivery problems, and asked what *I* was doing wrong, I got back that same message as an auto-response.
(At one point, my Postini score was 2 out of 100 – in other words, they were 98% sure I was spam. As a Postini employee eventually explained, this was because Postini had noticed that Postini had previously decided I was spam, and certainly, that makes it more likely that I’m spam. This is not the kind of “feedback loop” we all wanted.)
Wow, they’re missing out on a huge marketing opportunity. They could claim 0% false positives, just by using the old n.a.n-a.e trope that you can explain away any rake-handles in the face simply by saying the magic words “It wasn’t a false positive, because I ~meant~ to do that…”
Sorry for the lack of responses, been busy. I was trying to answer Rob’s question but the formating on the next page blocks out the text box from working.
Rob, I’ll assume this company may be using an outbound filter, that could be blocking the messages to you. Have you asked them to add your email to their approved outbound whitelist?
As an end-user at a company that uses Postini’s filtering, I find their false-positive rate to be annoying.
Having to carefully review the daily notification I get of what’s been caught as spam to find the inevitable false positives is frankly much more of a pain in my butt than having to delete spam that makes it past the filters into my mailbox.
IMO of course.
If your company policy does not allow you to customize your own settings, e.g., whitelists, filtering levels etc., then there is not much that you can do.
On the other hand, its your employers business and I’ll assume the benefits of them using the service, may outweight your annoyance.
If day to day business related messages are being quarantined on a regular basis, then they should be added either to the global lists for all, or setup in your personal and mailing list approved senders lists (ASL).
That said, even if the senders are added to your ASL, content filtering overrides any ASL.
I can almost support Postini’s stance, since each individual installation of Postini may be uniquely setup, and therefore has to be handled by that individual admin.
But when you contact those admins about false-positives, their typical response is to search the Postini knowledge base, and give you back this generic reply: “We have no control over the Postini spam scoring criteria. We sync up with the central Postini database, and the central Postini database says you are a KNOWN SPAMMER. Stop spamming, and Postini will delist you. Goodbye.”
This used to be a problem to us, but over the years, we’ve found that our customers just tell us, “No big deal, we’re switching from Postini anyways.” I think this’ll become more of a problem for Postini if they don’t change their ways.
This very issue angered one of our customers so much, they got Google (who recently bought Postini) on the phone. They eventually discovered we were in fact not a “known spammer” and that Postini had a bug causing us to get falsely blocked. Sigh. Don’t get me started on Postini. Ok Ben, think happy thoughts…
I used to have Postini-filtering turned on for my work email address. I got so annoyed at all the stupid and pointless quarantine notifications that I asked my sysadmins to turn off all filtering for my account. They did, and I’ve been happy ever since. I’ve never gotten much spam at that address, before or after Postiti’s filtering.
To Tim,
The notifications can be set to once a day, or up to 10-day intervals. They also provide a summary on the same set schedule, reducing the need to log in to forward a message if wanted.
To Ben,
Postini does not have a “list” that blacklists senders, they may block an IP when sending too many unlisted user messages, but no blacklist. They will from time to time have filters that may inadvertently block a sender, unfortunate as that may be, but correctable by both the recipient and Postini.
In general I have been a happy Postini user for years. They did a great job of grabbing spam and allowing through legitimate emails. I may have 1 or 2 get through or that I would have to allow per year. That is until Google bought them.
Now, even though they deny it, they have started blacklisting servers that are used by legitimate businesses. I have no problem checking my quarantine every once in awhile and approving a new legitimate sender. The problem I have with Postini now is that they completely deny full servers and never give you a chance to see the rejected email TO approve it.
At my work we have multiple concessionaires that rent space from us. They all have their own domains but use the same Hosting service. Verio. After Google bought Postini we started to get calls from the concessionaires that after about 3 days their emails to us were getting sent back as unable to deliver because our mail host (Postini) never responded to the request. I am part of our IT department and we did thorough testing from the concessionaires mail servers and then used alternative mail servers and found Postini was just refusing to respond to Verio’s servers.
Our concessionaire who we do business with daily have to use their personal email accounts to communicate with us.
Also my personal account has Postini and I have been experiencing the same problems with Postini just refusing email and not giving me a chance to approve it. The latest was eTickets from Disneyland. They were sent but Postini ignored the connection and the mail bounced back as unable to connect to server.
In my opinion Google better start worrying about some lawyer and a class action if they continue to censor their customers emails and deny they are doing it.
Personally I consider there actions as theft of my mail and have started to find an alternative for myself and my work.
Is there a tool that can be used to actually score your message to see what SPAM score Postini will assign the email marketing message?
You can purchase the postini software to score. Or you can use the tools at Return Path or Pivotal Veracity. Postini will stamp the score in the headers.