The words that used to fill us with dread 'e-mail upgrades!'. E-mail is the most important service that an ISP provides after connectivity so why does it get treated as a second class service? Well at Plusnet it doesn't! We've had our issues with the e-mail service in the past but these are long behind us and we have invested significantly in the platform in recent years, and continue to do so. In fact we're about to embark on more upgrades in the coming weeks and months, further improving our anti-spam/anti-virus solution by rolling out Ironport appliances. Then early next year we're giving our webmail a new lick of paint and moving to Roundcube. Those of you who've been around a while will remember that we upgraded our anti-spam/anti-virus solution around a year ago to a commercial product from Postini which gave us significant benefit over our in-house system. We have been working hard in the background evaluating a number of alternative systems including Postini of which Ironport was the clear leader for our environement. The key benefits of the Ironport system are:
- Improved detection rates
- Decreased false positives
- Outbound scanning to ensure we are not blacklisted
- DKIM signed e-mail
- Quarantine notification
- Secure SMTP delivery
We've seen issues mentioned this year on The Register with e-mail upgrades and migrations at Sky and this week migration issues at Tiscali I want to assure you that our planned upgrades will not cause you any issues and I'm sure you'll agree that they enhance your service. Bob will be along shortly with a detailed post on our planned migration to Ironport with all of the technical details of what the system will offer you. Update: Bob's post has now been published and can be found here. Phil Webb Networks Director, Plusnet