Postini

What is Postini?
Postini is a product of Google and is our new spam filter. All Staff and Faculty Email accounts are subscribed through Postini for an additional layer of security and filtering to their email messages. Postini receives all mail addressed to @ltu.edu and scans it for viruses. For the faculty and staff accounts, it also checks for spam content.

What is the Quarantine Summary I get every morning?
It is a list of messages that Postini did not deliver to your inbox because they met the spam criteria defined for our domain. In case one of the messages is incorrectly tagged as spam, you can click on the Deliver link in front of the message. This message will be delivered to your Inbox. Google will still apply it’s spam filter to the message and if the content meets the criteria it can still end up in your Spam folder.

How can we make the Spam filter in Google more effective?
Google’s spam filter can learn the user’s preferences for messages. If you find a message in your Inbox that is spam, check the box next to the message and click on ‘Report Spam’. This moves the message to the Spam folder and any future such messages will also be tagged as Spam. If you find a message is your Spam folder which is not spam, check the box next to the message and click on ‘Not Spam’. This moves the message to your Inbox.

Why has the number of messages in the Quarantine Summary increased?
During our migration, all messages were going through our old spam filter (Tangent) and our new spam filter (Postini). Tangent never reported which messages it blocked so users were not aware of the number of spam messages they received. Our contract with Tangent expired last week and now all mail is going to Postini. This is the reason the number of messages in our Quarantine Summary has increased.

What do I need to do with the Quarantined messages?
You should look at the Quarantine Summary to ensure there are no False Positives in the quarantined messages. If none, you do not need to do anything with the other messages. Postini will keep the messages on the server for two weeks before it removes them.

There are red tagged Virus Messages in my Quarantine Summary.
The report only shows you these messages were blocked because they contained a Virus. They have not been sent to your account so you do not have to worry about your computer being infected.