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One of our consulting clients has a huge problem with spam (mostly because their previous website displayed their email addresses for all to see in plain text which made life easy for email harvesters). The other problem is that some of their email addresses are very common and thus also targeted by spammers. But, to some degree, our client doesn't care why they're getting all that spam, just that they are. And it's a lot. After struggling with the tools the web host they are using provided, I decided to look at some additional tools and Google's Message Filtering came to my attention. If you are only interested in inbound filtering (which we are) you can get it for just $3/account/year. Since our client is highly price sensitive and has a large number of email accounts (they are a volunteer organization and the email addresses can stay the same when the volunteers change) this seems like a great deal.

It's powered by Postini, so the back end looks good. But, I like to try these things out before rolling them out to customers. So, I decided I'd sign up my business domain for the service. I get a little bit of spam, generally it's caught by the filters in Outlook or on my server. I was using StartLogic, which I'd been signed up with for about five years. To make a long story short, after much gnashing of teeth and trying different things, it turns out that StartLogic's mail servers can't handle the Google Message Filtering service. I believe it has to do with the way the MX records are described and how StartLogic figures out which domain the mail belongs to, but I'm not sure.

So, I decided to move my website to a different host. The obvious host in this case was SureTech's host - Pair. I had already been working on a template for our web portal - MassMind - so I just needed to put a few finishing touches on it before making the leap. I moved the site Friday and then updated the MX records for the filtering service this morning.

I'm pleased to say that everything is running smoothly now and my email appears to be getting filtered by Postini from looking at the header records. Hopefully the service will turn out to work as well as advertised and I'll have a solution for our client that works and is cost-effective.