For years our external email at CLC was hosted offsite by a third party. Each staff member had their Outlook configured to access both our Exchange server for internal mail, and the third party POP3 account to pull in their external mail. That setup worked pretty well for years, but it definitely was not ideal. The POP service was unreliable, so users constantly had send/receive errors in Outlook. The POP provider did virus and spam filtering, but we had no control over those settings and had no way to know what was being blocked. Also, Outlook Web Access doesn’t work right with this setup because the external email is only pulled in by the Outlook client.
For almost a month now we’ve been hosting our own external email. Now each Outlook client only needs to connect to the Exchange server, and I’ll be launching OWA to the staff soon. The external mail now flows through Postini before it gets to us, which provides our virus and spam filtering inbound and outbound. The transition to Postini was flawless, and I was able to get a 60 day trial so we haven’t paid for it yet.
Some interesting statistics from our 52 users over the past 27 days (8/9 – 9/4):
- 17,418 total inbound messages
- 8,171 (46.9%) spam messages blocked
- 1,281 (7.4%) questionable messages quarantined
- 7,966 (45.7%) legitimate messages
What’s the pricing like for Postini? We’re using SpamSoap to do the same thing (inbound/outband spam/virus filtering).
For us as a non-profit it’s $1.50 per user per month, and they waived the setup fee. I think it goes to $1.99 for businesses.