Virus protection service

[Austin R. Baer]

For whoever might be interested, my ISP (Montrose Internet) uses a service provided by a company called POSTINI that intercepts email, sorts out junk mail for user review and acceptance/rejection at one's convenience (item by item), and quarantines email. It effectively stopped Murray's infected message before it got to me, but allowed its contents to be read without consequence. . I'm surprised that Yahoo does not do the same thing for our group. In any event, I have no special knowledge of how Postini's services are made available (whether to individuals or ISP's only), but I thought I'd pass along their web address. It is www.postini.com . I don't think that they quarantine internet viruses other than email, but that they use one or more effective anti-virus programs that are available separately. Austin

[Chip Old]

Postini is one of several companies that sells complete e-mail service packages to ISPs and companies. The ISP or company then doesn't have to run its own mail server, and can contract with the e-mail provider for value added services like spam filtering and virus scanning. It looks like that is what Montrose Internet has done. Pre-filtering of spam and viruses works well for a small ISP with a relatively low mail volume, but it slows down mail delivery too much to be a practical solution for larger ISPs. For the majority of Internet e-mail users the best defense is still a good anti-virus program running on your own computer, with its virus description database kept up to date. On Sun, 8 Apr 2001, Austin R. Baer wrote to MG List:

> For whoever might be interested, my ISP (Montrose Internet) uses a > service provided by a company called POSTINI that intercepts email, > sorts out junk mail for user review and acceptance/rejection at one's > convenience (item by item), and quarantines email. It effectively > stopped Murray's infected message before it got to me, but allowed its > contents to be read without consequence. . I'm surprised that Yahoo > does not do the same thing for our group. > > In any event, I have no special knowledge of how Postini's services > are made available (whether to individuals or ISP's only), but I > thought I'd pass along their web address. It is www.postini.com . I > don't think that they quarantine internet viruses other than email, > but that they use one or more effective anti-virus programs that are > available separately.

-- Chip Old (Francis E. Old) E-Mail: fold@bcpl.net Manager, BCPL Network Services Voice: 410-887-6180 Manager, BCPL.NET Internet Services FAX: 410-887-2091 320 York Road Towson, Maryland 21204 U.S.A.