Afternoon all.

Quick heads up regarding the announcements I've just published to Service Status and the Comms Blog.

Some of you will be aware that we have recently been trialling Critical Path in front of the customer facing email platform. So far this trial has gone well and we're now at the stage where we'd like to introduce a second trial based on another solution provided by Postini.

Postini has been trialled on our internal Gatekeeper and Email platforms for the last couple of months and we feel that we're now in a good position to offer it to customers.

In doing this we hope to reduce the volume of spam emails customers receive, increase the accuracy of our spam tagging and improve the overall performance of the email platform.

We're looking for triallists to be moved across to Postini so if your interested then have a read of the blog post before heading over to http://trials.plus.net to register your interest.

If you're already on the trial then here's the place to leave any feedback you might have.

Will there be added headers for processed by Postini?

Edit: There are a number of headers added by Postini - information about interpreting those can be found here:
Interpreting headers added by Postini

Yes there will be.

This is a header excerpt from one of my internal messages:

Sorry - didn't make my question clear - will there be something akin to the "X-MAA: Suspected Spam" prior to tagging being switched on?

Sorry, completely misunderstood you.

The answer should still be 'yes' though.

Bob,

I've put myself down for the trial.

I'm already using Postini via my corporate network and I've found that it is very stable and picks up 99.99% of the spam sent in via our network..

Will Postini be white-listed on the CP boxes?

Bob,

Can I enter the trial if my xxxx.plus.com mail is turned off, and all my mail arrives via a domain name?

B.

Hi, well I've had more spam in the last two weeks and much of it obscene. I just hope that a lasting solution will happen and happen soon. My belief is that this has been going on for far too long for me to continue to be loyal to plusnet. If the spam reduces to an acceptable amount then that will sway me back...
ChrisC

I just signed up to the Postini trial. In the past I set up a 'black hole' to dump a vast number of e-mails I started getting. If I get into the trial could this be recinded now to see if (at least) the majority are stopped by Postini?
Or have I got the wrong end of the stick, Postini does not stop this?

I assume that if we sign up to this trial the spam settings for our email accounts remains the same. i.e in my case spam goes to the spam folder but does not get deleted.

Paul

Not as such, no. To begin with the only whitelisting we'll have will be that on the sunmxcore's. This is where the subject line tagging is actually applied (regardless as to which anti-spam mechanism identified the email as spam) and is one way we'll be able to fix false positives.


Yes.


Postini should reduce the volume of spam you receive, yes.


Yes that's right, although Postini should stop more junk from actually getting through in the first place. This level of 'edge' blocking is applied irrespective of your spam settings and how noticeable it will be will depend on the amount of spam you get in the first place.

At the moment it appears that the CP servers may be refusing to accept odd mails (in particular from badly configured servers). If Postini accepts the emails, could they then be refused by CP?

Theoretically, I suppose this is a possibility. These would be few and far between though. THe CP boxes are configured to refuse exactly the same emails as the sunmxcores were before they were introduced.

With this Postini trial, will any mail that has been blocked will it be held on the Postini service if say you are expecting an e-mail that has been incorrectly marked as spam and blocked?

Or will their be a way of checking a log to see what has been blocked just incase?

When this trial starts, will the people who are on the trial have immediate access to the per user settings of the service or will this be introduced at a later date?

Thanks

Andy

Is there anything PN can do to stop labelling as spam mails between user1@mydomain.co.uk to user2@mydomain.co.uk? I am tired of forwarding these mails to despamchecker.