Postini

To find out how to sign up for Postini click here.

How It Works
When an email is sent to your MAIN address, it first passes through a set of filters on Postini's own servers. These filters check each message to identify those that contain viruses, junk solicitations and get-rich-quick schemes or pornography, for example.

Suspicious messages are diverted into a separate "Message Center" maintained by Postini, while messages that make it through the filters are delivered to your inbox as usual with no noticeable delay. The system is completely automated, so no person will review your messages. Your privacy is protected.

You will receive an e-mail from Postini whenever suspected spam or a virus has been caught on its way to you. You will then be able to visit Postini to delete the messages safely or, if they were diverted unnecessarily, to send them on to your in-box. If you don't do anything with them, they will be automatically deleted after 14 days.

Postini's user-friendly interface allows you to customize each filter extensively. You can, for example, instruct the system to be very aggressive in filtering out pornography while being less stringent with get-rich-quick schemes. You can also instruct the system to always block email from a particular address or domain, or to always allow mail from a particular address or domain to get through.

If you have questions please review the Postini FAQ page: Frequently Asked Questions

For an extensive guide with screen shots and explicit directions for using Postini, we highly recommend the Postini User Instructions page: Postini User Instructions

To go to the Postini Account Login page to check your settings click here.
Your login for Postini is your EMAIL address. Example:
username@county.main.nc.us

Make sure you are not confusing the Postini message center login (which uses your email address as the "Log in address") with your MAIN login (which uses the first part of that as the "user name".)

Your password was sent in a message from MAIN entitled: MAIN has Activated your New Mail Services!

If you forgot your password or get a message saying you have the incorrect password when you try to log in to Postini or if you don't have a temporary or permanent password, put 123 or abc or something in the password field and click the Log In button. You will then get this response: Invalid log in or server error. Please try again. Look for and click on "Forgot your password?" and follow the directions and a new temporary password will be sent to you by email.

After you get the temporary password, log in to your Postini Message Center. You will be asked to create a new permanent password after first log in. This does not have to be your MAIN password.

Virus scanning is automatically activated. Please note that spam filtering is initially set to "off", so if you wish to filter junk mail you will need to adjust your settings - just click the "Junk Email Settings" link. Click the On button, then set a level for each type of junk mail. Click the Save Changes button and check your Message Center often during the first few days so that you can customize your settings and assure that good mail is not delayed.

Still Getting Some Spam
With all your settings at maximum, very little that you don't want will get through, compared with all that was sent. If Postini had more aggressive settings, you probably wouldn't get any mail at all. Advances made by Postini to filter out junk email are countered by advances made by junk email producers to get around the filters set up by Postini, which modifies its filters, etc., etc., etc. Junk email is probably going to be around a while with this going back and forth all the time. If you want to get rid of EVERY instance, you may need to add an email filter on your email program on your computer and maybe risk missing emails you want.

Postini - Blocking Senders
Postini's user-friendly interface allows you to customize each filter extensively. You can also instruct the system to always block email from a particular address or domain, or to always allow mail from a particular address or domain to get through. Click on Junk Email Settings, then near the bottom, look for Blocked Senders.

Using other spam filters with Postini
Mail for all MAIN addresses using Postini are filtered by their system - but that won't affect it going somewhere else, either before (e.g. where you use another address that's then sent to your MAIN account) or after (e.g.where your mail is sent elsewhere after it comes to your machine by a program on that machine). Almost all spam scanners that use outside servers use some form of this, and it should work even though mail comes through Postini to get to MAIN.