"When messages pass through the Postini service, header and transaction data about these messages is stored in a log," explains Gopal Shah of Google Postini team Previously, admins only had access to this data through customer support. With the Message Log Search feature, email administrators can now easily run searches on these logs and drill down to the details about how specific messages were processed."

Administrators can look at things like whether messages were delivered, quarantined, archived, or encrypted.

"Say an admin was checking the delivery status of all inbound emails from Matthew Smith," says Shah. "Message Log Search returns results which include who received the message, date/time, disposition, and more."

The feature has been available in beta testing, and Shah says customers have found it useful for things like tracking errant emails, figuring out why certain people didn’t get messages, proactively searching for "problem senders", etc.

Log search is now available through the Postini service administration console, and in Google Apps Preimier Edition.

Related Articles:

> Google’s Postini Suffers Problems

> Google Pushes Its Security And Compliance Products

> Google Rolls Out New Email Security Services

Lots of customers in both America and the U.K. reported delays in email delivery of up to several hours.  There may have been glitches in other countries, including Belgium and Japan, too.

Then, to make the matter worse, customers had difficulty logging into the Postini Support Portal that could have let them research and discuss what’d gone wrong.

Few users were especially pleased about all this.  While it may be one thing for Google’s free products and services to fail, it’s quite another for Postini – which costs between $12 and $45 per user per year – to have a liedown.  And, taken together with recent Gmail and Google News outages, the Postini development may point to a largish problem.

The issue seems to have been resolved by now, anyway.  A Google spokesman also assured Sharon Gaudin that "[w]e know how important mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and apologize for the inconvenience."

 Google’s Security And Compliance Survey

Through a third party, Google talked to 575 CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs.  A slight majority of those folks (53 percent) felt that IT was mostly responsible for security and compliance.  The Annual Google Communications Intelligence Report then notes among its key findings, "IT professionals face serious challenges in reaching security and compliance goals."

Also, "Security and compliance challenges negatively impact IT productivity."

At last we get to an interesting conclusion: "Communications security and compliance solutions based on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model can address these productivity issues."  A chart even suggests that the total cost of using an SaaS vendor is $15,000-$52,000 cheaper than going through appliance or software vendors.

Other facts and suggestions surround these points, so it’s not as if Google’s declared open war on IT departments.  Still, on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, Amanda Kleha writes, "With Google’s recent launch of new security and compliance products, organizations of all sizes can afford and easily implement best-in-class security and compliance."

For the sake of safety (and truthfulness), we’re now going to remind everyone that WebProNews loves its IT guys.

Google Message Filtering, Google Message Security and Google Message Discovery. According to Google they will operate with any email system, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Novell Groupwise.

Google Message Filtering offers basic spam filtering for any email server and is available for $3/user/ per year. For $12/user/per year Google Message Security provides email security and policy management for incoming and outgoing email messages.

Google Message Discovery is available for $25/user/per year and offers security, policy management, archiving and e-discovery for any email server.

On the Google Enterprise Blog Sundar Raghavan writes," You can buy them online, enable them in hours, and protect your business immediately. No more worries about upgrades and patches either — they’re automatic. We believe in giving our users choice, so you can pick the service that best suits your needs and budget."
 

Over on SecurityProNews, we’ve suggested several times that the battle against email threats needs to be taken off the desktop and to the gateway. Now that Google has its Postini acquisition well in hand, they have opened up services to do just that.

Google announced three packages of email security and discovery services at Google Apps today. Each package is priced per user per year.

For $3/user/per year, Google will filter spam and malware for addresses, no matter what email system users may be on as clients. For $12/user/per year,  Google adds enhanced virus protection, outbound processing, and content policy management to its message filtering.

At $25/user/per year, Google adds a year of data archiving and retention to the security and filtering features.

Enabling this service means trusting Google with passing email through its Postini system to handle whatever level of protection has been purchased. Given concerns about Google and privacy, and handing them access to more information seems like something that may give security pros pause.

This is, to emphasize the point, an unconfimed rumor.  It comes from Wired’s Betsy Schiffman, though, so we’re not inclined to dismiss the idea.  Schiffman notes, “Our source says that among techie circles, conventional wisdom is that if your company is bought by Google, you’ll have to re-interview for your own job.”

Also, Google responded with the closest thing imaginable to a “yes” while sticking to the “no comment” rule.  “While we cannot comment on the specifics, we have evaluated our staffing needs and allocated our resources to meet those challenges and grow strategically,” the company stated.  “We continue to monitor our growth to best meet the needs of our users, clients, and publishers, including from time to time, expanding or reducing staffing areas.”

If the layoffs occurred, then, are they a sign that even Google is scared of the current economy?  Or just a standard round of corporate belt-tightening?  We may never know.  We’re definitely hoping to resolve the “if they occurred” part, however, so we’ll direct a hat tip to Nathan Weinberg and suggest that you stay tuned.

Google Preps Postini For Business World

Google plans to push Postini, the email security firm they purchased, with business customers. They have offered existing Postini customers free use of Google Apps Premier Edition through June 2008, according to an AP report.

Google wants businesses to sign on with its Google Apps service. Fifty dollars annually per user gives them Google Docs and Gmail with a level of support; more importantly, Google does all of the application maintenance and upkeep, including spam filtering.

Email and the sensitivity of its content makes businesses wary of using an email service that isn’t under its direct control. Postini’s customers have used that product to protect existing mail servers.

Google began promoting Postini’s features, as incorporated into Google Apps. Postini enabled Google to offer security and compliance features for mail, including the ability to recover deleted emails on a 90-day rolling basis.

As an added incentive, Google will boost the storage capacity of Gmail for its Apps clients from 10GB to 25GB, according to AP. Along with the Postini security features, Google has a much stronger pitch to offer potential business clients.

It’s still not a Microsoft killer; that’s up to the market to decide. But Google Apps is reaching a level of maturity where it can be reasonably considered. It isn’t just the applications and email features a business would receive, but the ability to lower demands on internal tech staff for application and email support.

Some businesses will find that last part a compelling one, and we’re sure Google will make it a point of discussion during its pitch to the business market.

Neither Postini nor Google has made an announcement about the new development, so this article may be a little short on “their company will be good for us” and “our company will be good for them” quotes.  But both parties are undoubtedly pleased that the $625 million purchase can go through.

“Google plans to use Postini to boost security for their hosted application suite Google Apps,” reports Steve Ragan for Monsters and Critics.  And Google and Postini may not be the only happy ones here: “Several companies have expressed concern over the potential risks of hosting corporate email on Google’s systems.  The deal with Postini was made to alleviate those fears . . .”

At the very least, it hasn’t caused any new ones – Google’s stock is up slightly today.  Then again, Google’s stock is almost always “up,” so the Postini deal may not have made much of a financial impact in either direction.

Google’s acquisitions department has also been rather unexciting lately; with this arrangement wrapped up, one has to wonder if Google will resume its buying rampage.

Google will pay $625 million for Postini and the company will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Postini’s services include message security, archiving, encryption and policy enforcement. Postini’s services can be used to protect a company’s email, instant messaging and other Web based communications.

"With this transaction, we’re reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes. With the addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to users — they can also streamline the complex information security mandates within these organizations," said Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Google.

Postini provides on demand communications security and compliance solutions to 35,000 businesses and 10 million users globally. Google said the deal would allow it to offer businesses more hosted services like Google Apps, which includes Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets and Personal Start Page.

"Postini’s founding vision is to bring to market technology solutions that address enterprise messaging problems in a different way. Our on-demand offering liberates businesses from the burdens associated with traditional on-premise solutions."

"We are proud of what we have done to achieve our vision on behalf of our customers, and combining Google and Postini is a powerful next step in this creative journey," said Scott Petry, Founder, Chief Technical Officer, and Executive Vice President of Product Development at Postini.

“This continued rise in spam levels is threatening the viability of e-mail for businesses that are not properly protected, and is sapping the productivity of hundreds of millions of workers around the world,” said Daniel Druker of Postini. “Just fifteen minutes per day dealing with the increased volume of spam can cost companies $3,200 per employee per year, which adds up to tens of billions of dollars of lost productivity around the world.”

Most of the increased volume of spam in 2007 will come from bot-nets. These are networks of personal computers that spammers use to flood the Internet with spam and viruses. Bot-nets enable spammers to send an unlimited amount of spam for free by using millions of infected personal computers and network connections to send the unwanted messages.

Postini predicts there will be an increase in spam in 2007. Because of globalization more personal computers with high-speed Internet connections could be prime targets for spammers.

In December hackers released a large social-engineering based email virus known as the Happy New Year worm. The massive attack increased the daily volume of email viruses on the Internet by a factor of twenty on New Year’s weekend.

The top five viruses for December according to Postni were nuwar, netsky, stration.gen, downloader and mytob.

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Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.