Google Challenges Compliance Competitors with New Postini Features

By Marisa Peacock | Published Feb 8, 2010

Google's New Postini Feature Puts Log Search in the Clouds Three years ago Google acquired Postini providing email security and archiving services. Now they take those services a step further with their new Message Log Search. Here's what it does.

Drill Down to the Details

Google has announced a new feature called Message Log Search, which provides Postini users with search and analysis capabilities. When messages come through Postini, transaction data about these messages is stored in a log. The new search service relieves the need to go through customer support to access this data, as was the case before.

With the Message Log Search feature, email administrators can now easily run searches on these logs and "drill down to the details" about how specific messages were processed. As a result, administrators can monitor messages received or sent from your server, to see if they were delivered, quarantined, archived or encrypted.

Google Postini Message Log Search - Results screen

The message security service stores information about your messages in a log, but doesn’t store the actual message. Users can also save search results for later analysis that can be exported to a .csv file.

Making Amends, Advances Log Search

While Message Log Search is good news for users, it’s the least Google/Postini could do. Back in October 2009, Google experienced significant email delivery problems, which as you can imagine, outraged many business customers — more than half of Postini's customers are using the service for content policy management.

This new feature may not be a direct result of the delivery issues, but it certainly makes things easier for everyone. As well, it advances the computing in the cloud discussion and how it challenges email compliance.

Since acquiring Positini, Google has been developing opportunities to make its security, archiving and management technology available beyond Gmail into emerging services like Google Wave.

Message Log Search is now available through the Postini service administration console to Postini and Google Apps Premier Edition customers.