
Spam and malware are so prevalent in e-mail these days that some sort of filtering is usually necessary for enterprise email. Services such as Google’s Postini simplify this task by offloading it to the cloud.
Basically, to use Postini, you change your MX records to point to Postini, so that it accepts email on behalf of your domain. Then Postini forwards the filtered emails to your server.
One possible problem is that some external systems may need to connect with your server directly; for example, if you’re relaying email messages from Salesforce, Postini may reject those messages if they’re not addressed directly to your domain. This can be an issue if someone involved in the configuration wasn’t aware or forget that Postini was set up, or if an external vendor looked up your MX records and sent relayed mail there even when it shouldn’t be going through Postini. The headers of messages sent from Postini will show “Received: from psmtp.com” at the top. If messages that should be relayed to you aren’t getting through, check carefully that they’re being sent to your server’s public IP address if they aren’t supposed to be going through Postini.