Postini Email Security Benefits and Features

• Shield your MX record

  Every domain has at least one mail exchange record (MX record) to relay emails to the correct address. If your mail server has only one MX record, it is exposed to the public for spammers to easily view and access. Inevitably, junk mail, viruses, and harmful messages will flood your unprotected mail server. 

  With Postini Email Security, your mail server will be sheltered from the outside world by up to four MX records provided to you upon setup of your Postini^® service. No messages will reach your system without first routing through this anti-spam and anti-virus filter. Your server and MX record will be safe from infiltration and protected from malicious or junk emails.

• Protect the repution of your mail server 

  If your MX record is not sheltered from public view, spammers can “borrow” your mail server and use it to send mass spam all over the Internet. Your server may then be placed on an email blacklist which would cause other domains, potentially those of your clients, to reject mail sent from your MX record. With Postini Email Security, your mail server will be sheltered from the outside world by up to four MX records provided to you upon setup of your Postini^® service.

• Block unsafe emails

  Unwanted emails waste your resources and are potentially dangerous. Spam may redirect you to phishing sites that can compromise your personal information. By using Postini Email Security (aka Postini Inbound Filtering), you will block these unsafe emails. Messages received by your employees will not put your privacy in jeopardy, and your overall security will be increased.

Postini Email Security Features

Postini offers a full range of features with many options for user customization.

• Attack blocking and connection protection

  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.

• Secure system with real-time filtering

  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.

• Spam, virus, and content filtering

  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, spam filtering, sender lists, and message limits. Messages caught by a particular filter can be processed according to your preferences. By quarantining spam, an administrator or users can review suspected spam and retrieve messages that are actually legitimate.

• Easy to set up and use

  You can register your mail servers, domains, and users and make all configurations from a standard Web browser, without having to install or maintain any separate hardware or software.

  From the Web-based message center, each user may view quarantined messages and send any legitimate emails to their inbox. 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. In addition, the administrator can give users permissions to turn spam or virus filters on or off, set spam filter levels, manage their own sender lists, and more.

• Scalable administration and user management

  Postini makes it easy to manage protection across a large user base and also delegate specific management tasks among administrators. For example, high-level administrators can maintain control over the entire deployment, while others can be given authority to manage specific user groups.

• Optional directory server synchronization

  This utility adds, deletes, and moves your users in the message security service to match the user directory on your LDAP server.

• Graphs, reports, and other administrator tools

  The Administration Console provides several tools that help administrators monitor email activity, filter effectiveness, server performance, and events such as an email attack or a server outage. The home page and several server-related pages display graphs of 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.

Postini Email Security Enterprise Features

In addition to all the features of Postini Email Security (listed above), the Enterprise edition provides the following:

• Attachment and content filtering

  Messages passing through the message security service are evaluated by all of the filters listed above plus the following:

  • Attachment manager filters - Messages can optionally be filtered based on the size or file type of any attachments.
  • Content manager filters - Messages can also be filtered based on key words or phrases in the message header or body.
  • Industry heuristics - With this optional feature, messages can be filtered specifically for users in the legal or financial industry (available only with some service packages).

• Outbound filtering

  You can set up filtering of your outbound mail (messages sent outside of your organization) to ensure secure mail connections, enforce messaging policies, and add virus protection.