So, to combat spam, I recently deployed Postini at my workplace. We qualified for the K-12 promotion to it is awesome to have good spam handling for free. We currently use FirstClass as our mail server, and I’d rate it’s built in spam-handling mechanisms as “poor-to-none.” (We are eying Google Apps mail as a replacement in the next year or so.)
So, after finally getting Postini deployed and enabled for all accounts, the Postini stats report that just over 50% of incoming mail is being tossed out as “blatant spam,” with over 25% of the remaining mail being quarantined as “potential spam.” This is with Postini on the default lowest aggressiveness setting. So, assuming the worst case (“all incoming mail is spam”, which is almost true), our users are already receiving less than 37.5% as much spam as they used to. Once we’re satisfied that things are working fine, I’ll bump up the aggressiveness.
Anyways, I noticed that my FirstClass inbox was still being bombarded by spam messages (a few per hour), most of them obviously spam. Why weren’t these being blocked by Postini?