Cheers.

I also recommend to my clients that if they choose to use Google Apps – which I do not recommend – they absolutely should go with the paid edition. It’s craziness to put your entire business in the hands of another business without having any support recourse than a forum. I’d want a support telephone for certain – and I’m a web developer.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I don’t recall mentioning any other issues other than quite aggressive spam filtering – workarounds to which I outlined above.

From what I understand, Postini gets at the mail simultaneously with Google Apps, i.e. Postini is the spam filtering.

If there is a second layer of email filtering at Google Apps, I would be interested to hear about it as dual layered spam filtering is very dangerous. The notices from the first filter can get blocked by the second. Happened to me recently.

Currently I am blocking spam on the server with SpamAssassin and then locally again with SpamSieve as neither additional server side filtering, nor Eudora Spamwatch has been enough to keep my inbox clean. The latest spam seems to mock SpamAssassin coming through with 0 scores, lower than lots of legitimate mail.

My mail is complicated enough (multiple mailboxes, forwards from other domains, marketing materials) that any off=the-shelf server side solutions result in an unnacceptably high false positive rating.

With SpamSieve, I had a very bad first few days – lots of false positives and false negatives – but as the learning is all custom, matters are improving quickly now – to the point that I have an almost clean inbox and very, very few false positives.

To return to Google mail, of all the server side solutions, Google mail seems the best.

On principle (Google’s close relationship with national security organs of the United States of America), I won’t give them my mail to browse. For those less sensitive to privacy issues, Google Apps – with a lot of fine-tuning – might be the best server side solution available.

Alas, I don’t know if you can fine tune the Postini filters directly from Outlook or if you have to do it in the Google Mail web client.

I’m more concerned about Google Apps spam filters blocking email that is whitelisted in Postini, plus I want all spam to flow through to the end-user, marked as spam by Postini, so that they can browse diagnosed spam in Outlook and not have to go check for missing email via a web site (as one must do with Gmail and GA). Any thoughts on this subject?