Report: Il Postini

Randy (Furo) mentioned on Wednesday that he was being buried with viruses thanks to the never ending streams of e-mail to his inbox. I had to smile since I, too, have felt the sudden upsurge of this sort of thing. However, I am not suffering too much since I am a Postini user. Recently I had it installed on my mail server so that viruses would not be able to reach my inbox. All in all I have been pretty happy with the performance that Postini has provided - resulting in my life becoming easier.

They offer two distinct features that I really appreciate. First and foremost is the server-side virus protection. Knowing that 99.9 percent of the virus-containing e-mail will be stopped dead in its tracks really does put my mind at ease. The second feature that Postini offers is spam containment. While this feature is far from perfect, it does a pretty darned nice job, everything considered. I would have to say that 98 percent of the spam that comes my way is quarantined and is kept away from my inbox. The measly 2 percent that does manage to sneak by is quickly put in its place by the Bayesian filtering used by my e-mail client, Thunderbird.

So how do you handle it?

What do you folks do to fend off the never ending onslaught of computer viruses coming through e-mail? Do you simply update your anti-viruses and cross your fingers? Maybe you have a specially devised plan of attack that practically guarantees that an infection on your machine is a thing of the past. Whatever your solutions may be, I want to hear about them. E-mail them to me here and I will share some of the results with you next week.

Let’s get digital,
Matt Hartley