Stop Spam Once And For All With Postini

Spam is such a nuisance and dealing with it was taking time away from productive, business-generating activities. I needed an industrial-strength solution to stop it once and for all.

That solution is Postini. For $12 per year (per mailbox that I want to have protected), their Message Security product puts an end to all junk mail. It works by filtering out all messaging threats including spam and viruses before they each your mailbox.

Set up is a little more complicated than other solutions as you need the ability to modify your mail server records on the Internet (the technical term is MX records in DNS) to route all incoming mail for your domain name through the Postini server first. [I offer consulting services to assist anyone that would like help setting this service up; contact me for details.] For example, I use Exchange Hosting at Intermedia (read this article for more information on this). I went into the Domain Manager, added the four MX records per the instructions provided by Postini, and emailed Intermedia to delete the MX record pointing to their server. I should note that when you change mail server records, it can take a few days for them to be copied all throughout the Internet. Postini does offer several testing utilities which will verify that you set everything up correctly.

You can then set up your mail accounts and customize your settings to control how aggressive the spam blocking is, list your safe and blocked senders, and more. There is a lot of power and flexibility in the product. Within a few days of use, there was no more spam in my Inbox or Junk Mail folders in Outlook.

Messages that are blocked are stored in a Quarantine file that you can access through the web. You can elect to receive a daily email summary of messages that are quarantined, or you can access them directly through the web interface. If there is a message that you want to allow to be delivered, you can click on it and it will be delivered to your inbox.

For more information, visit http://www.google.com/postini.