Postini® offers a full range of features with many options for user customization. Click on each feature below to view a more complete description.
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Connection Manager protects against email attacks, where an outbreak of harmful traffic originates from a single server, including Directory Harvest Attacks (DHA) and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Connection Manager also protects against significant spikes in spam or virus activity. Attacks are detected and blocked when the offending IP address attempts to connect with your email server. The source IP address is temporarily blocked, causing all messages received from that address to be bounced back to the sender.
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For increased protection of your network, detection and filtering of suspicious mail occurs at our data center. This is a robust and secure cluster of servers that is wholly managed by our personnel. A pass-through spam detection engine works in-line with SMTP traffic to scan and sort messages coming in from the public Internet.
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Messages passing through the filtering service are evaluated by several filters that can approve, block, or divert a message based on criteria you specify. These include:
- Virus blocking - Detected viruses can be deleted or sent to a separate quarantine, depending on your preference.
- Spam filtering - Not only can you set a level for how aggressively to filter spam overall, but individual category filters let you filter more aggressively for sexually explicit content, racially insensitive content, get-rich-quick offers, or commercial offers, depending on your organization’s tolerance or policies.
- Sender lists - You can allow or block messages based on the sender’s email address or domain.
- Message limits - You can limit the number of daily messages received by a user or group of users.
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Messages caught by a particular filter can be processed according to your users’ preferences. For example, you might opt for a message to be bounced back to the sender, deleted with no return message sent, or placed in a separate quarantine where you can later review it and optionally forward it to the user. By quarantining spam, an administrator or users can review suspected spam and retrieve messages that are actually legitimate.
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Your mail exchange server will be sheltered from the outside world, protected by up to four MX records.
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This utility adds, deletes, and moves your users in the message security service to match the user directory on your LDAP server.
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To set up service for users, you need only register your mail servers, domains, and users with the service. Then you configure their filtering and services. You can do this all from a standard Web browser, without having to install or maintain any separate hardware or software.
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Each user may flush or delete messages, set his or her language preference, and control the user-level accepted and blocked sender list. The domain administrator has even broader abilities to add domain and user aliases and control the functionalities and settings at the domain and user levels.
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With the message filtering service, you can easily maintain common services, filter settings, and email policies across your entire user base, while also tailoring service for individual groups of users. You do this by arranging users in a hierarchy of organizations (or orgs, for short).
For example, you might apply a general policy against anyone being able to receive mp3 sound files, set everyone’s spam filtering to moderately aggressive, and provide a master list of approved senders. However, users in Sales might want more lenient filtering, and Marketing might need to receive mp3 files. These users can be placed in a separate org that inherits its configuration from a master or parent org, thus retaining desired common settings. Each org can then be tailored as necessary for its users. Service can also be tailored for individual users. For example, some users might want to add their own personal allowed and blocked senders.
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Postini makes it easy to manage protection across a large user base, and also delegate specific management tasks among administrators. High-level administrators can maintain control over the entire deployment, while others can be given authority to manage specific orgs (user groups). You can also control what tasks an administrator can perform.
For example, a Customer Care representative might be authorized to assist users in basic ways by adding them to the service and managing their filters and sender lists. A more technical administrator might be able to perform tasks like blocking traffic from an IP range or configuring a mail server, while a policy maker can set policies for what types of messages users can receive.
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You can allow a given group of users to manage their own spam, viruses, and other filtered messages by enabling access to the Message Center. Users can log in to the Message Center in any Web browser to see what is being filtered and why. They can forward any falsely quarantined messages to their inbox. In addition, users can be given permissions to view or modify aspects of their own service at the Message Center. For example, they can turn spam or virus filters on or off, set spam filter levels, manage their own sender lists, and more.
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The Administration Console provides several tools that help service administrators monitor email activity, filter effectiveness, server performance, and events such as an email attack or a server outage:
- Graphs - The home page and several server-related pages display graphs reporting real-time statistics on the number of messages recently delivered, blocked, quarantined, or spooled, recent attacks or server outages, successful and failed connections, and more.
- Reports - You can track email activity and filter effectiveness by generating any of several reports on the Reports tab. Data in these reports includes the number of messages delivered or quarantined for a user, organization, or domain, the number of messages being forwarded from quarantines to users’ inboxes, the number of messages caught by a particular filter (spam category, virus blocking, sender list, etc.), and more.
- Server event tracking - Get detailed information about recent attacks, server outages, and spooling events. Information includes the IP source of an attack and the time and duration of any outage or spooling.
- Administrator alerts - Report significant events to administrators, such as a server outage or spooling, as soon as they occur by sending automated email notifications.
- System test tools - Quickly test and trace mail flow, test server latency, verify your MX record configuration, troubleshoot mail flow problems, and test your firewall, using a set of tools available for each organization.
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When you make a change to your service configuration, the change takes effect the next time any sender’s server opens a connection with your email server. Assuming that your server receives a fairly constant stream of incoming traffic, most changes go into effect within seconds or minutes. Existing connections are not affected by the change. But as connections typically last only a few seconds, this causes no appreciable delay in the changes taking effect.
In addition to all the features listed in the Postini Inbound Anti-Spam Filtering Features section above, the Enterprise edition provides the following:
