How Postini ruins the good news about DKIM and Google Apps
I was very pleased to see Google’s announcement yesterday about Email authentication using DKIM now available to all Google Apps domains[1,2]. DKIM is an important weapon in the war on spam, and may well be crucial to stopping email from slipping into irrelevance. Of course this may just make the spammers go after our Google Apps credentials, but we have two factor authentication (at least for GAPE/GABE) as a means to fight back.
Sadly there’s a fly in the ointment, and once again it’s with Postini:
At this point I’m pretty much ready to give up on Postini. It’s anti spam features don’t seem to me to be that much better than native Gmail/GApps. It’s confusing for my users to get a daily quarantine message from Postini and stuff in their spam folders on GApps (usually it’s bacn in both – I see very little real spam in either). The only thing that we use it for that adds any value is adding a compliance footer, but now that stops us from having DKIM.
Of course one might expect a high end product like Postini to have DKIM support in its own right. Sadly this is where Postini is too ‘enterprisey'[3].
So… compliance footers with a link to some legal boilerplate that nobody bothers to read[4], or DKIM so that our email stands a better chance of actually reaching its intended recipient? Not such a hard choice really – seems like I have some GApps domain admin work to do.
PS Google – it would be great if you could make the labs feature ‘Authentication icon for verified senders’ work for all DKIM authenticated email and not just PayPal and eBay.
[1] DKIM has been available in regular Gmail for some time.
[2] Though I’m disappointed to see that it’s not yet available for thestateofme.com (whilst I have been able to set it up for some other domains where I use Google Apps).
update 8 Jan – it turned out that I needed to turn on ‘Next Generation’ for the Control Panel in Domain Settings – General for the DKIM options to show up.
[3] Don Box – So Long, 2006 ‘The blogosphere embraced the term “enterprisey” to describe the lack of quality that previously had no name’.
[4] I know from the web logs.
Filed under: could_do_better, technology | 5 Comments
Tags: DKIM, GABE, GAPE, gapps, google, Google Apps, Postini, spam
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This is a bummer, what did you end up doing? Anyway to configure postini to allow DKIM to work?
In the end I removed Postini and asked the team to put the compliance link into their sigs.
Google still haven’t fixed this, but some small progress has been announced today – http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/06/adding-another-tool-in-fight-against.html
After just a couple of days of using it I am already fed up with Postini, for pretty much the same reasons you mention above. Why they haven’t just rolled the most useful Postini features into GApps and done away with it as a separate service altogether (or at the very least ditched the awful clunky interface and put the admin features into the GApps control panel) is beyond me. I am going to turn it off right now…
Google Apps now supports appending a compliance footer without configuring Postini. It’s the best of all worlds especially with the news that Google is killing off Postini.