Server Operations & Security

I’ve actually gone through this process twice now – one at my previous firm and recently at my current firm.  When you’re ready to evaluate a SaaS solution provider, you most likely want to use an existing email account to have an apples-to-apples comparison of the anti-spam and anti-virus features.  However, this is fairly hard to accomplish without changing the DNS MX record for your domain.  When I went through the evaluation process, all the providers wanted me to create a new public subdomain.  While this is the safest evaluation method, it’s really meant for organizations that have no choice for evaluating a SaaS solution provider either because their current email protection is on-premise or their current SaaS solution does not have a way to split mail delivery.  I didn’t like the subdomain approach because it’s not a real evaluation of the spam and virus protection.  I would prefer using an existing email account to get an apples-to-apples comparison.

The benefit of being a current Postini customer is that you can have split mail delivery by creating an “Email Config” with an associated “Sub-Org”.  This new “Email Config” will then route emails for any users in this “Sub-Org” to the SaaS provider you are evaluating.  If you wanted to evaluate multiple SaaS providers at the same time, you can easily do this by creating additional Sub-Orgs.  Before proceeding, I suggest informing the SaaS solution provider you are evaluating that you plan on using this method.  The SaaS solution provider you are evaluating will essentially see all incoming emails coming from Postini IP addresses and some SaaS solution providers may treat this as a spam blast, so it’s best to inform them ahead of time just in case you need to make additional modifications.

1. Create a new Postini Email Config. In my example, I will name it “SaaS Email Config”
2. Create a new Sub-Org under the “SaaS Email Config”. In my example, I will name it “SaaS Users”
3. (Optional) Modify any Organization Management settings for both the Email Config and Sub-Org
4. Under Inbound Servers | Delivery Mgr, click on Edit and under Email Servers, enter the DNS name or IP address that the SaaS solution provider requires for inbound email. This should be the same DNS name or IP address if you were going to make an MX change for that SaaS solution provider.
5. Move an existing Postini user to the newly created “SaaS Users” Sub-Org.
6. Change the user’s “Spam Filtering” to Off and “Virus Blocking” to Off.
7. Test inbound email flow with an outside email account. You basically have Postini passing the email without any scanning to your SaaS solution provider.