Google's Postini suffers prolonged e-mail delays
As of 2:15 p.m. Tuesday e-mail delivery had started to return to normal for some Postini customers, although problems remained.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)Some customers of Google's Postini e-mail security product experienced significant problems Tuesday, with reports of hours-long delays in e-mail delivery that are still affecting some customers.
Threads throughout Google's Postini forums spread involving the issue, which seemed to begin overnight on System 7--one of several systems used by the service--and was still affecting some customers as of Tuesday afternoon, although e-mail delivery had resumed for others. Users also reported problems accessing the management consoles used to log into the Postini service, preventing them from understanding exactly what was happening.
Postini, acquired by Google in 2007, offers e-mail security services to businesses. Postini scans all e-mails directed to the networks of its customers for viruses, malware, and spam, passing along the genuine messages to the network once they have been cleared. However, Tuesday it appeared that for a significant portion of the morning, all messages for customers using System 7 were blocked before they reached their destination, and customers could not log into their accounts to see what was going wrong.
A Google representative acknowledged the e-mail delivery delays in a statement. "We're aware of an issue that's causing a delay in mail delivery for some Postini customers in the US, and are working to fix it as quickly as possible. We know how important mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Postini support portal at https://www.postini.com/support/support_login.php."
It has not been a good week for the cloud. Hosted applications and services such as Postini were sure to get a second look following the debacle at Microsoft involving the Sidekick and possible data loss.
It's also another example of Google's growing pains with customer support. Google Checkout customers reported significant issues for over a month without any resolution, and angry e-mail administrators on Postini's message boards complained that Google support personnel were very difficult to reach during Tuesday's issues.
Google support technicians promised some Postini customers--who pay between $12 per user per year and $25 per user per year--that their e-mails were not lost, which is at least some good news for customers affected by the problems. But running a business without e-mail in the 21st century is a very difficult thing to do.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
As more people try to get into cloud computing, the greater frequency we will probably these sort of snafus. Wise people are probably just going to ignore cloud computing for five or ten years, maybe even more.
You simply can't trust anyone else to handle your mission-critical data and services. And unlike Danger LLC, at least *I* know where *my* offline backups reside.
1. Contract with two geographically distant co-lo facilities
2. Provision two mail servers, configure them for HA / failover
3. Provision two firewalls or routers/switches and also configure them for HA
4. Provision two more servers & an SSL cert for webmail
5. Integrate accounts with LDAP / AD
6. Install anti-spam, anti-virus, hids & nids
7. Install log monitoring, alerting capabilities
8. Create an off-site backup solution (via network or physical delivery / tapes)
9. Manually enforce content & retention policy
10. Periodically create reporting for compliance & audit
11. Schedule regular maintenance windows for patches
12. Train your helpdesk staff to troubleshoot issues
OR:
Option B: Get Postini for a measly $25/yr/user.
Sure clouds go down, but the real question is do they go down more then with what you could do on your own?
It does not mean it will always be availble to your users. Good luck with that.
I would rather not pay for all the extra stuff you need, including the monkey that clicked next to build the server. The cloud is ready and I will use it. I will save money and make a profit.
Who collects revenue with email anyway, it's mostly spam and users asking the wife what's for dinner.
So it gets delayed a couple hours, big deal.
You young folks need to learn a little patience. Can't believe we ran the whole economy on paper and our own brains before the punks and under achievers took over. The young ones can't even figure out how to open a book much less spend time reading one. If they can't search the internet for an answer they are all but lost. maybe I will make them a youtube video that explains how to live without email for a couple hours. Buck up and start thinking about the bottom line before you end up looking for a job.
Also keep in mind that all these services are is a relay with a filter. People are still storing and maintain their emails. using the cloud to kill spam and malware before it gets to you is a still a great idea.
1) Does this only affect stand-alone customers of Postini, or also Google Apps Premier Edition subscribers who use the bundled Postini service and happen to be assigned to Postini's "System 7" server?
2) Does this affect outbound mail as well for those who use the Postini (System 7) outbound gateway service?
I ask because I have a 50-user Google Apps Premier Edition account which seems to have been affected starting last night as well! The account is using Postini "System 7" to process all inbound mail as well as outbound mail.
- by port3128 October 14, 2009 2:10 PM PDT
- I think its a bit of an overreaction to blame this on cloud computing, I think its clear that this is a Google issue. Since Google has purchase Postini they have done nothing to improve the service and their support is horrible. i was told when I called in for support that since I didn't meet the 3000 user threshold, I was entitled to email only support.
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(13 Comments)I got a response 3 days later to a minor issue around my DNS settings. I have since left Postini and looked at several services, including MXLogic (but ran from them when I found out that McAfee bought them), MessageLabs and Webroot SaaS. We ended up going with Webroot for many reasons. I have not had a single issue and we are now trialing their Web SaaS as well, and I must say its pretty darn good. We are testing their roaming user filtering and it works pretty flawlessly.
Either way, this isn't a Cloud issue, its a Google issue. Same with all of the other giant providers, they just forgot about what ever made the service good.