The company says 5.0 has better source-based filtering, a way of catching spam based on the past behavior of the IP address from which it is sent, that sometimes means spam can be blocked before the message is even sent.
Postini has started correlating source IP behavior data across its four data centers, to improve the quality of this data, according to worldwide director of products, Andrew Lochart.
The user interface, which is web based, has also had a complete overhaul, Lochart said. In previous versions, the UI has been identified as a pain point for some administrators. Postini’s coders have been at work on the new one for nine months.
The latest version of the service also allows positive (non-spam) weighting to be given to email originating from IP addresses that have hardly or never sent spam, Lochart said, so that spammy qualities in a legitimate email will not trigger a false positive.
A new block blatant spam feature allows administrators to configure a threshold beyond which suspected spam will not even be quarantined. This will be useful for firms wanting to prevent employees treating the quarantine folder as their porn folder.
Postini, believed to be on the IPO track, says it has 3,600 direct customers, probably a few thousand more smaller indirect customers, and five million inboxes under management. The firm added 750 customers in the second quarter.
The privately held Redwood City-based company says that the second quarter was its first profitable one, and that revenue and bookings grew 30%. OEMs Trend Micro Inc and Nokia Corp together accounted for 10% of revenue.
It’s such a hot market right now, the rising tide is raising all the ships at the moment, Lochart said. But I suspect we are growing faster than the market.
