E-Mail Service Touts Simplicity

-mail security vendor Postini this week plans to take the wraps off a hosted e-mail security service specifically to help small businesses fight spam.

The Postini Perimeter Manager Small Business Edition is a managed security service optimized for unsophisticated e-mail infrastructures, simplified policy needs and relatively low IT staff and budget resources.

“The service gives our resellers exactly what they need to get customers to buy in,” said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing at the Redwood City, Calif.-based vendor. He said the service is easy to install, configure and maintain, and solution providers can activate it in minutes.

The service also boasts some sophisticated features, including a phishing blocker, seven days of disaster recovery spooling to help protect against e-mail system outages, and an actionable quarantine summary, which eases access to quarantined e-mails after the service has deemed them potential threats.

These features attracted the attention of Eric Rachal, president of eTools Group, a solution provider in Austin, Texas. Rachal said the service is a good investment for his organization because it doesn’t have too many bells and whistles.

“It gives us an opportunity to help smaller customers who need world-class e-mail security but not the full set of features required by larger enterprises,” he said. “When you have only the features you need, the manual shrinks, which lowers your cost of training and ongoing support.”

Harry Segal, president of Networks Unlimited, Hudson, Mass., said his customers appreciate the speed and ease with which the new Postini solution solves problems. “IT people get excited when they see how little the Postini service requires of their resources,” he said. “It really opens doors.”

Pricing was not disclosed.