Postini

» see postini.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard of postini was the july 2007 google acquisition headline. before that it had been an enterprise email security brand that sat behind corporate mx records, and i had no reason to know any such names in 2003 (close enough). anyway, postini was founded in september '99 in redwood city by shinya akamine, gordon irlam, brian maggi and scott petry. the product was a cloud spam and malware filter. you pointed your mail's mx record at postini's servers first, postini cleaned the incoming stream and forwarded the survivors to your internal exchange or sendmail box. in those days this was a novel architecture.

by february 2005 postini was filtering for 4,200 companies and 6 million end users, with ten data centers in the us. the customer logo wall by then included merrill lynch and hormel, the kind of accounts that justified a several-hundred-million-dollar valuation. for some reason, processing volume around the peak was 2.5 billion emails per week. either way, the company filed for an ipo in march 2007 then pulled it in june when google offered to buy outright.

on july 9, 2007 google announced the deal at 625 million dollars in cash, the largest google acquisition to that point after youtube. honestly, the strategic logic was that google needed enterprise email security to push google apps into business accounts. postini already had the deals and the runtime infrastructure for it. for a couple of years the brand kept its own name inside google. the product roadmap merged into google apps in parallel.

on september 2, 2011 google announced the postini brand and standalone service would be discontinued and customers would be migrated to google apps with the security features built in. the original august 2012 cutover slipped through extensions, and the email archiving service stretched into 2015 with the move into google vault. the spam and malware gateway itself was retired by the end of 2013. anyway, the postini brand was gone from any google product page within a year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it actually worked ~

the architecture was an early example of email as a service. you changed your domain's mx record from your own server to a postini hostname. mail then arrived at the postini cluster first. there it was scanned for spam scores and virus signatures, with the customer's own policy filters applied right after. rejected messages went to a per-user quarantine console. the survivors were forwarded over smtp to your actual mail server. in those days the value proposition was that postini absorbed the spam load before it touched your mail server. you saved cpu and bandwidth on your own side.

to be honest, the optional add-on was archiving. postini retained a copy of every passing message for compliance, which is the part finance and healthcare cared about. archive search was the harder feature to migrate when the google fold came, because every existing customer's compliance officer needed a chain of custody on the records (roughly). the migration tooling for archives is what slipped the 2012 timeline into 2014 and then 2015.

~ what it became ~

google apps for business absorbed the spam filtering as a built-in feature, with malware scanning rolled into the same path. the more advanced policy-based filtering became google apps message security, and later google apps message discovery. eventually it folded into google vault. honestly, the postini name disappeared completely by 2014. customers who still wanted classic postini features could subscribe to vault for the archiving side. the gateway-style mx redirect model never came back as a standalone product inside google. it became a checkbox inside the workspace admin console instead.

~ what survived ~

this part you had to be working in enterprise it for, and i was not. either way, postini's contribution to internet plumbing was proving that cloud-hosted email scanning could be sold to fortune 500 it departments at scale. mimecast in london and proofpoint in sunnyvale built the same model with a few years of head start over the rest of the industry. by the late 2010s nearly every business mail account was being filtered by some external gateway before it touched the internal server. that pattern is what postini sold first. it survived the brand by another decade.

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