Postini Exiting ISP Business?

Hey there.

We have been using Postini for a number of years as our anti-spam/anti-virus
protection for customer email accounts.

Mid last year we received a notice from Google that "In 2013, we plan to
transition your Postini services to Google Apps for Business."

As part of this notice we were also told "You don't need to make any changes
to your Postini service or sign up for a Google Apps account. Your Postini
service will continue as usual until your migration begins. We will be in
touch at least 60 days before your renewal date."

In mid November, Google sent us a letter that stated that we had until the
end of 2013 to basically get off their service or to contact their preferred
partner (Tech Excel) and migrate to Google Apps with them.

Recently we have now been told in email by someone at Postini that we "must
transition ASAP" and that we really only had til the end of 2012. Geesh,
talk about confusing.. Not a great way to treat a long term customer!

Anyone else getting the complete "run around" by Postini? We are fine with
leaving them, especially now. Having said that, I'm interested in hearing
about competitive solutions either in appliances or in cloud based - this is
*not* an invitation for sales people to call me please.

Thanks,

Paul

We got off Postini many years ago, and have never looked back..
We switched to Katharion, today they are known as GFI Max Mail,
Let me know if u are interested in switching, I will be more than happy to send u the contact info for them.

Regards

Faisal

We're in the same boat as Paul and have been investigating McAfee Email Protection (used to be MX Logic). A bit more expensive than Postini, but also more full featured. Additional options can be added on as well, like archiving & outbound encryption.

We've thought about deploying a virtual appliance in our datacenter like Barracuda but kind of don't want to have to deal with administering it all ourselves in house. Outsourcing is attractive to us for this service.

I am an enterprise guy, but we've been running MS Forefront Online
Protection for Exchange for a number of years with very few issues (that
aren't determined by flags/polices we've set). The few issues that we
have had have been with delayed SMTP handoffs between Hostopia (Bell's
backend provider) and FOPE, but I haven't had reports of that for a
couple of years.

Thanks,
Erik

I used to work for Postini, but have long since lost touch with pretty
much everyone there. I'm actually surprised this didn't happen sooner.
When Google bought them (what, over 5 years now?), it seemed fairly
obvious they were going to be integrating them into their own email
offerings. The lack of customer service is, somewhat sadly, fairly
typical of Google's offerings. Once you get into dealings with
Google's actual business units it's a little better, but still always
a challenge to reach a human being who can actually give you straight
answers and simplify things. Actually, pretty typical IME of almost
every company that's run by the Tech people(top execs not
withstanding, they've always favored promoting/hiring techier people
to oversee pretty much everything... even sales types get the tech
screen interviews, just with lower grading standards) to forget how to
actually treat customers.

-R>

We use mailfoundry internally ourselves, but I have a customer who has been raving about mimecast for years and I am on the verge of switching over to them.

Thanks
Sameer

+1

(Yes, I see the irony in that.)

I've been saying this about Google for years. This problem first became evident when gmail was still in beta, when major problems went unfixed for over a year, when gmail itself was still in beta almost 5 years after they went public with it. While Google is good at a lot of things, and very good at some things, they are horrible at customer service. I use Google for many things, but I don't RELY on them for much. I would be very cautious about relying on them as your sole source for a critical enterprise service like email spam filtering.

jc