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Google's Postini clogs email in US, UK

Google's Postini email security and spam filtering system is seriously clogged, with businesses on both sides of the Atlantic complaining that the hosted service is slow to deliver their messages. As of 2:30pm Pacific, it appears that the problem has lasted for several hours. Jeff Wojciechowski - LAN/WAN telephony admin for …

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Version 1.0
Pint

What's the problem?

This is a web service costing $12-45 per user per year - what sort of service were you expecting at that price? The general rule in life is that you get what you pay for .... eventually.

...some mother's do have 'em...

Mahatma Coat
Thumb Up

Excellent terminology

"one tit up?"

Wonderful.

VoodooTrucker
FAIL

Postini is crap

Google doesn't sync with them automatically - i.e. it is a seperate POP/SMTP service. So if you want to be xyz@yourdomain.com instead of xyz@gmail.com, you have to wait for Google to check your pop account. Which by default is once an hour, and the only way to speed this up is to click repeatedly on a link. I understand why this should happen for non-Google hosted mail, but Postini *is* Google! Whats up with that?

Also, there is no way to get ahold of Postini. I had a problem with my mail account a while back. I couldn't find any Postini contact info to save my life. Postini's site just says "we were acquired by Google", and Google's site just says "sign up for Postini here..." There are no support links anywhere!

Needless to say my mail is hosted elsewhere now.

gollux
WTF?

Given the pure stinking...

pile that is email today, that wouldn't surprise me.

Main business contactact account here on Monday, fielded 4000+ spams and 3800+ viral messages for almost 8000 pieces of garbage. I would estimate that probably 450 emails were received that passed. Manually sorting through the quarantine got me an additional 8 useful messages.

So if the math is correct, about 95% of the email we receive is garbage, with 45% being pure viral attack...

So, who else is out there that can provide that volume of filtration?

Aaron Guilmette
FAIL

System 7 Affected

I noticed the most problems delivering to customers on Postini System 7 (domain.tld.s7??.psmtp.com). My customers on S8 seemed to be unaffected. I did receive the "too many connections" error when attempting to log into the support portal owhich I think is a service shared across all Postini systems). Logging in to the S8 admin console was fine.

As I Postini customer and (and now a reseller) for a combined total of nearly 6 years, I can say that I never had the types of outages and problems in the pre-Google days.

Paul Eagles

Broken, of sorts

Some of us UK people are definitely suffering. I did wonder why I only had 1 email overnight and it now makes sense. I've done a bit of testing and some messages I sent about an hour ago are still to be delivered.

Gollux - only 95% is spam? My company is using Symantec Brightmail (we bought it before Symantec took over and ruined everything) and it reports that about 98% of everything we receive is crap. There are numerous other places that will provide that level of filtration.

I quite like Postini but the spam filters are often overly sensitive for my liking despite tweaking them. I'm getting far too many false positives for my liking.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

@Gollux

95% garbage fits in with what I see reported by our GFI filters. Most of it is addressed to anyoldname@ourdomain.com and those are dumped automatically, the blacklists take care of most of the rest.

Steve Foster
Joke

Hadn't realised...

...that Postini workers were members of the CWU...

Anonymous Coward
Flame

This was a pretty big deal!

The issue is now apparently fixed but was effecting users accross Europe and the US from early morning GMT on the 13th.

The issue effected system 7 and lasted caused widespread delay of message delivery. Especially effecting Google Apps customers using Postini

Some major companies were adversely effected by this and it was being refered to as an all hands on deck issue within Google/Postini...... techs on calls I was present on were mixing with some big named clients yesterday...

Jacqui

@gollux

8000 spam/450 ham is a very very *light* hit ratio.

The worst we got was nearly 60000 spam /<10ham

A tuned (hacked really - added SPF etc) version of ASSP filtered all but 20 or so of the spams and let *all* of the hams through. Prior to thsi we used S::A et.al and managed to wreck a dual core raid box running it in less than six months...

However we do have a very small client base with new customers referred by existing clients.

Cold calls are non existent - YMMV

Anonymous Coward
Megaphone

See more information about the outage

More information can be found on the IT-Trenches blog Google’s Postini services restored - cascading issues caused message delivery issues - http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/it-trenches/googles-postini-services-restored-cascading-issues-caused-message-performance-issues

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