Last year Postini chairman Shinya Akamine got the ultimate compliment for a spam fighting company. Ronald Scelson, or the "Cajun Spammer," told him, "I have to hand it to you guys, I can beat all the spam filters out there, but I can't beat yours." If the spammers respect you, you've got to be good.
Since Akamine and Scott Petry founded Postini in 1999, they have gone from the days when they "literally sat in a conference room and managed cash" to a company with 4,200 clients and 10 data centers around the U.S. Its success, Forbes suggests, stems from its one-time "radical approach" of routing all emails through its data centers before delivering the emails (scrubbed of the offending spam) to its corporate clients' servers.
Right now, the company is privately funded, and its revenues are comparable (Akamine says) with companies like Brightmail, which had planned to go public before being acquired. Will Postini go public? It doesn't look like it - Akamine says that he didn't get to where he is today by "following the crowd."
1. I'm amazed. We tried Postini for a small installation (~50 accounts) in early 2004. With most of their settings set to fairly aggressive filtering (4 on their 1-5 scale), Postini gave false negatives for at least 20% of the spam -- a lot of which SpamAssassin caught.
Also, at the time, certain types of spam could not be passed on to the customer's mail server. End users had to visit Postini's portal to delete those messages. I assume they've added a way to tag and deliver since then, but their tech folks confirmed it did not exist then.
We went back to SpamAssassin. The Bayesian autolearning is superb. We haven't touched it in 8 months.
Posted at 4:51AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Troy