Postini
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What is Postini?
Postini is a mail filtering system that companies use to filter emails for spam before reaching an inbox. A corporation chooses to contract with Postini to filter their company emails before reaching a company user's inbox to prevent the delivery of spam.
How does mail filtering work?
When an email server (such as Boomerang's server) contact's Postini's email server and attempts to deliver a piece of mail, Postini accepts the email and then applies a set of filters to the inbound message. Sometimes when the email is filtered, it ends up in a quarantine folder that the user has no access. Sometimes the mail ends up in a spam folder under the user's mail account. Unfortunately, in Postini's process of filtering, it is known that Postini drops a certain percentage of emails on the floor (the emails simply go missing). When the email is missing, it is unknown exactly what happened to the email. At this point, only Postini can answer this question.
What can I do to resolve missing emails?
If you know or suspect your company is using Postini and you are missing expected emails, here are several recommendations:
- Look through your Spam folder.
- Contact your IT Department and have them look through Postini's quarantine.
- If you are still unable to locate the emails, have your IT Department contact Postini for more information.
If Postini is unable to help or locate your emails and you continue see missing emails, here are a few more recommendations:
- Send your test emails, instead, to Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or Google's Gmail or another email server outside of Postini.
- Ask for your emails to not be filtered through Postini.
- Ask your IT person to whitelist Boomerang's email servers at Postini (Boomerang will give out the IPs on request).
If you need to deliver emails from Boomerang's server to your entire company through the Postini filters, then you will need to request that your IT department whitelist Boomerang's email server's IPs. However, note that making any of the above changes may not resolve the missing emails if this issue stems from a Postini server overload problem.
What are the ramifications of missing emails?
If Boomerang is sending to a domain filtered by Postini and some of the emails go missing without explanation, then this is representative of a bigger issue. So, not only are Boomerang emails going missing, this likely also means that other sites are also having their emails go missing as well. Unfortunately, the sender may assume the email was delivered even though Postini didn't deliver it.
Receiving spam is an issue and it is quite annoying, but always receving the spam allows you to at least search through the spam to find your emails. When emails go missing, you don't even get the choice of searching. This means that potentially critical emails are being lost as a result of problematic filtering solutions.
How can I identify if my company uses Postini?
This is a bit more tricky. The easiest way is to ask your IT department. If you want to find out yourself, you can use nslookup from the command prompt of your computer system. In the example below, we used the domain of 'postini.com'. You will need to replace this with your company's domain name. You will want to make sure to set querytype to MX so you only receive mail exchanger records. If you see 'psmtp.com' in any of the 'mail exchanger' lines, then your company is using Postini. See example below:
# nslookup > set querytype=mx > postini.com. postini.com. Server: 199.242.204.82 Address: 199.242.204.82#53 Non-authoritative answer: postini.com mail exchanger = 300 postini.com.s8b1.psmtp.com. postini.com mail exchanger = 200 postini.com.s8a2.psmtp.com. postini.com mail exchanger = 100 postini.com.s8a1.psmtp.com. postini.com mail exchanger = 400 postini.com.s8b2.psmtp.com. Authoritative answers can be found from: postini.com.s8b1.psmtp.com internet address = 64.18.7.10 postini.com.s8a2.psmtp.com internet address = 64.18.7.10 postini.com.s8a1.psmtp.com internet address = 64.18.7.10 postini.com.s8b2.psmtp.com internet address = 64.18.7.10
