We provide spam and virus filtering with all email accounts – you really can’t use email without it anymore.
We’ve used Postini for our premium spam filtering since 2001 (twelve years!). Google bought Postini in 2007, and Postini continued to be excellent until about a year ago when we noticed that things were slipping – there were outages, a lot of mail that wasn’t spam started to get quarantined, things like that. Then Google decided to discontinue Postini, along with quite a few other services.
We evaluated seven good alternatives, and Barracuda was the clear winner. The spam/virus filtering is excellent – they push out updates to the filtering rules as often as three times / hour, so they do a great job of catching spam blasts that use new techniques to around the filters, and most people will find that they have few, if any ‘false positives’ (non-spam that gets quarantined). We’ve been testing the Barracuda system and using it for our own email since February, and we think you’ll find it a real improvement. We’re operating the Barracuda servers in our own cloud, so we have direct control of uptime and reliability.
We’re switching domains over in groups, and should have everybody switched by May 18. You’ll get email announcing the change before your domain is switched. The change will be almost completely transparent to you – the only real change you’ll have to make is the link to your spam quarantine, which will be in the announcement email.