Google Apps - Changes to Postini

[enjay]

As Google Apps users will know, they're about to merge the Postini spam filtering into Google Apps, and looking at it, it seems that they are taking away an enormous amount of functionality in the process. At present, suspected spam messages are caught by Postini; students never see these emails, and staff get a daily wrap-up of blocked messages, and can release any they wish from quarantine. Unless I'm misreading all this, under the new changes we can only block spam using pre-defined "bad email" policies which I have to create from scratch myself. Furthermore, any spam emails will get rejected, not quarantined. Given the nature of some of the spam messages which are being blocked for me, I really don't want our children receiving these emails, but nor do I have the time or the know-how to produce a decent rule-set for identifying spam messages.

 

Am I getting this wrong, or are our pupils about to start getting a whole load of spam?

[AngryTechnician]

The spam will end up in their Spam folder just like normal Gmail. In my experience, the default Gmail spam filtering is very good, but the messages can still be seen if they go to the Spam folder.

[GrumbleDook]

Which means students will see adverts for V!4gr4 and so on?

[enjay]

The filtering is very good, you're absolutely right; the number of false positives is low, and the number of spam messages which get through is even lower. My issue is that I don't want children seeing these messages at all, as many of them are whatever the child equivalent of NSFW, others are phishing attacks which I know to ignore but younger children might not and some are chain letters which can be quite upsetting for children.

[CyberNerd]

you can still setup a regex to reject spam.

We set passthrough on postini a month ago and it's not caused any issues yet.

 

edit: you can always defer:

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1381105

Edited December 2, 2011 by CyberNerd

[enjay]

you can still setup a regex to reject spam.

I don't just want to reject it though, as some legitimate emails do get caught by Postini, and users like being able to release these. Also, unless I'm misreading this, I have to define what is and is not spam, in order for it to get rejected, where previously Postini was doing all that.

 

you can still setup a regex to reject spam.

you can always defer:

Postini Integrated Service: Transition to Google Apps Email Security - Google Apps Help

 

Thanks, didn't know that. I've applied to defer it and specified that we use Postini features which aren't currently in Google Apps, namely the quarantine (although in truth the feature I'm using is them identifying spam, not me having to identify it).

 

My issues with having to set up the spam-detecting ruleset myself are a) time, b) know-how, c) liability (if I define the ruleset and spam gets through, that is on me, but if Postini does it, then we have pass the buck a bit).

[CyberNerd]

I'm really relying on google's own spam filter, but yes I see your point that it gives students control of whether they consider it spam.

Previously, with postini, we gave students the choice of whether they wanted to deliver their spam anyway.

 

the regex is (\W|^)f\s{0,3}\W{0,3}_{0,3}([uv]{1,3}|\W{1,3})_{0,3}\W{0,3}\s{0,3}[c[<]{0,3}_{0,3}\W{0,3}\s{0,3}k(\W|$) ing good.

[enjay]

We had it sent to quarantine all suspected spam, and give the teachers (but not pupils) a daily summary of their quarantined emails so that they could release any they wished to.

 

How do you set the regex thing?

[CyberNerd]

 

How do you set the regex thing?

 

email settings > org settings > students (assumed) >add setting > content compliance > add advanced

 

Spamilator has some useful regular expression examples:

Spamihilator » Use the Spam Word Filter to add Regular Expressions

 

 

theres a way of getting it to re-write the header and forward, I'm not sure if you could setup a way of rejecting and forwarding - from the console it doesn't look like it. maybe a global delete and forward?

[enjay]

Thanks, that Spamilator site looks useful, but it still seems like a shed-load of work to set up and maintain.

 

I guess this is the trick - lure us in with free services and then once we've found them invaluable, withdraw them and start charging...

[enjay]

theres a way of getting it to re-write the header and forward, I'm not sure if you could setup a way of rejecting and forwarding - from the console it doesn't look like it. maybe a global delete and forward?

 

Not natively, but there are bolt-ons like Gpanel which (I think) would allow me to create filters on everyone's accounts, so pupils could have things prefixed [spam] automatically deleted straight away...

[CyberNerd]

 

I guess this is the trick - lure us in with free services and then once we've found them invaluable, withdraw them and start charging...

 

I'm pretty sure they intend on moving all postini services to google. I did see a roadmap for it at one point.

Some of the marketplace apps definitely do this though