[27012] in resnet
Re: Question for Google Apps for Edu email users
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Wieringa)
Thu Nov 10 09:26:40 2011
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Message-ID: <4EBB97F2020000C6000847BF@gwdom.calvin.edu>
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:22:58 -0500
Reply-To: Resnet Forum <RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu>
From: Christopher Wieringa <cwieri39@calvin.edu>
To: RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu
In-Reply-To: <4EBBD49C.80008@wheatoncollege.edu>
I'm assuming you are looking at the Postini services along with the Google Apps for Education hosting. Currently, we have our Student email using Google Apps for Education without the Postini services. The spam/virus protection is equivalent to the protection offered by a normal Gmail account. Additionally, email messages are transferred to Google Apps via TLS/SSL when the sending mail server supports it. IMAP/POP3/SMTP is also set up via SSL/TLS as well ( https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78799 ).
A big thing that you gain with the Postini services is a good way of monitoring what goes in and out of your accounts, what actions are taken on messages, email discovery, etc that you do not have available within Google Apps. If you feel the need for legal compliance or other issues, Postini can be a great value. If we decide to move our Faculty and Staff email to Google Apps in the future (still in-house now), we most likely would go with Postini services in conjunction with the move.
For our students though, I am very happy with our switch from our in-house webmail system (late 2008). We almost immediately saw a vast decrease in HelpDesk calls from our students - prior to the conversion around 25% of student calls were email-related, now we average about <2% of calls are email related. Along with the email migration to Google Apps, we enabled a lot of the other apps (Docs, Calendar, etc) which have also had good adoption rates on campus. Our old webmail solution had limited ability to be used with mobile devices, and the Google Apps integration with mobile devices has been excellent as well.
Chris Wieringa
cwieri39@calvin.edu
Sr. Systems Engineer
Calvin Information Technology
>>> On 11/10/2011 at 8:41 AM, Brian Gibson <gibson_brian@wheatoncollege.edu>
wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> We are researching email/calendaring alternatives and I'm trying to get
> a straight answer about whether the free offering from Google is usable
> as far as email goes. There is a "Google Message Security" piece that
> you can add (pay service) and it states the following 2 features...
>
> "Stops spam, viruses, phishing, denial of service, directory harvest
> attacks, and other attacks before they reach your network without
> message loss or disruptions to email service"
>
> "Protect sensitive messages such as financial data and personal content
> by using industry-standard SSL or TLS protocols"
>
> Does that mean there is *no* anti-spam/virus/phishing protection at all
> if we opt out of it or is there some base level that we get with the
> free version? Does the 2nd item mean without it people cannot do IMAP
> (inbound) and SMTP (outbound) over SSL/TLS from their email clients and
> if they use AirSync from their smartphones/tablets it is not using SSL/TLS?
>
> I'd love to hear back from some email admins about these answers, and
> equally as important, has switching over to Google (or Microsoft Live)
> made your life harder or easier?
>
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Brian Gibson
> Systems Administrator
> Wheaton College
>
>
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