CoNetrix

Blog: Postini

Recently, I was tasked to work on separating 2 companies in Postini that were no longer under the same organization. In order to create the new account, I had to first delete the domain under the old Postini config which also required deleting all the users. I ran into a slight issue with this.

  • In order to delete the Org, you must delete all the domains under the Org.
  • In order to delete the domain, you must delete all the users under the Org.
  • You are not allowed to delete pdefault@example.com because the Org must have a default user.
  • You cannot create a new account for domain.com because the domain is in use under another Postini account.

The trick here is to assign a new default user for the org and then delete everything. Simply go to the Org General Settings and scroll down until you see Default User.

From here, you can change that to any user that already exists under your account. Even one under a different domain and Org. While this was a very simple solution, it was a little hard to realize what needed to be done because of the steps I went through to attempt to simply delete an Org from a Postini account.

Security and Compliance, Postini,
 

We had a user recently that was reporting excessive amounts of spam in her inbox. This company uses Postini as their filtering service, so naturally, this didn’t seem quite right. After some research, I determined that it was non-account blocking (a Postini feature) that was causing the problem. In this example, let’s assume the user is Jane Smith. Her email address is jane.smith@company.com. The spam was coming into jsmith@company.com, an alternate SMTP address in Exchange.

Non-account blocking in Postini bounces all email that comes to addresses not registered in the Postini user database. If this feature is not enabled (as was the case here), Postini does not filter the email according to the spam filters and, instead, passes it through untouched. The jsmith@company.com address was not added into the user database as either a user or an alias to a user. When Postini received email on this address, it passed it straight through to their exchange server. The exchange server recognized the recipient as a legitimate user and delivered the mail as expected.

The fix here was to enable non-account blocking and add these secondary SMTP addresses as aliases in Postini. Jane has not received any spam since then.

Exchange, Postini, SMTP,
 

By default, Postini sends the quarantine summary using an address on the customer’s domain (i.e. postmaster@yourdomain.com).  Since this address doesn’t actually exist on the Postini servers, it’s technically spoofing the reply-to address.  Normally this isn’t an issue, however if the customer has internal spam filtering like Symantec Mail Security for SMTP or Exchange Intelligent Mail Filtering, this email will likely be tagged as spam.  So if you’re moving your email to run through Postini, be sure to exclude that address from filtering, otherwise you’ll spin your wheels trying to figure out why they’re not getting the quarantine summary.

Networking, Exchange Intelligent Mail Filtering, Symantec Mail Security, Postini,
 

Do you know where your data is? Recently I had a user who was looking to deliver a message that had been caught in her Postini Spam Quarantine 8 days prior, but when she logged in and viewed her Spam Quarantine, the message wasn’t there. She must have deleted it from her quarantine on accident. Performing my due diligence, I wanted to confirm that the message was in fact there at one time. I found her Spam Quarantine Email Summary that did indeed show the email in question in her quarantine. Out of curiosity I clicked the “Deliver” link (in the quarantine summary email ) that was next to the sought after email. Lo’ and behold, up pops the desired email in her Inbox!

A follow-up support call to Postini confirmed that Postini keeps all quarantined email in their system for two weeks, even if you delete an email from the quarantine then also “permanently delete” the email from the trash section. This retention period can be changed from 14 to 28 days, but a support call is required to make this change and once changed it cannot be reverted back to 14 days.
Networking, Postini,