That’s great news Rob, thanks for the heads-up!

I received an email response from my request for a sales rep regarding Postini at non-profit prices. Here’s what they (in specific, Peter from The Google Message Security Team) said, in part:

We don’t actually have the non-profit pricing available online at this time. We’re working on making the non-profit pricing available directly online. We don’t have a specific timeline for that, but definitely check back with us later!

If you would still like to move forward with the non-profit pricing right now, I can forward you along to one of our direct sales representatives if you are planning on making a purchase of $1,500 USD or more.

So basically, unless we’re over three times the size we are, we have to wait. This is going to leave a bunch of churches and other non-profits waiting out in the cold for an undetermined length of time. Education customers may, in general, have larger email user bases to qualify for direct sales, but that’s just my guess. I hope their non-specific timeline is shorter rather than longer; perhaps they’re working hard on it right now but don’t have it up since the change is such a new announcement. There’s just no way to know yet, given this response. A note of some sort to this effect would be appreciated on the pricing web page, but as much as I like them, Google will do what Google will do. I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon!

UPDATE the next day: My reply to Google went like this:

Thanks for the information and clarification. But you are still saying that if we are wanting to purchase a plan for less than $1500 we will need to wait for online availability, correct?

and Google Rep Peter’s reply was:

You’ve got it exactly. We’re making the $1,500 option available for people who are already planning on paying that much, or need the service deployed either right away, yesterday, or as soon as possible.

If that doesn’t fit your needs, I would recommend sitting tight while we get the Google Message Discovery online purchasing process up. We don’t have a set timeline for it, but it’s going to be sooner rather than later.

This is mostly good news. They aren’t committing to a date, but it seems to be coming soon. When it does, you can bet we’ll be jumping on it like a frog on a lily pad!

I’m waiting to hear from a Google sales representative to confirm pricing and details, but based on this pricing chart, it looks like the non-profit pricing for their highest level of service will only be $8.33/mo, or less than 70 cents per month, per user. We’re paying more than twice that for our current hosted anti-spam, anti-virus filtering service, and it doesn’t do message archiving! Basic spam filtering would be only $1/year/user, or the mid-range plan adding some security features would go up to a whopping $4/year/user. I sure hope I’m reading these prices right, ’cause if I am, Postini will be getting another customer!

Interestingly, the pricing chart is for Postini as an add-on to Google Apps for your Domain, which has a free premium version for non-profits. The chart is not specifically for the Postini stand-alone service. However, if necessary, that service does let you dual-deliver messages both to the Google webmail interface and to your own email server, so setting up a free account to get the Postini pricing wouldn’t be a humongous deal. However, I’m curious to see what the pricing will be for Postini without going through Google Apps! My suspicion is…it will be comparable. When I submitted a request to talk to them, they replied and said they have a lot of people to contact due to the new pricing. No kidding!

(Hat tip: Jason Powell via #citrt).

This isn’t the first time this has happened; I tried the same thing with another email that had spam issues and Outlook also thought the attached email had no headers, even though it came from the internet (rather than being originated in Exchange) and certainly did have headers. I even managed to get that one forwarded through to the anti-spam support, and they were able to find the problem; in the headers. So I know the headers are there, since they will get forwarded with the message again. But how can I view them? Anyone with a working answer will be greatly appreciated with a reward of me posting his or her name in a new post thanking them for the solution :-)

I’m using Outlook 2003 connected to Exchange 2003 Standard, and my user is running the same, and forwarded the original spam to me “as an attachment.” Google does turn up plenty of results from my searches, but they all reference how to view the internet headers of a regular message, not one attached to a forwarded email.

The emails appear to have stopped on Friday, although if they continue I can easily block them at one of several points (such as our spam filter).  I’ve sent an email to our staff explaining the details in case anyone was confused about the sender of the emails.  But there is no easy way for me to track down who actually sent the emails, since technically, Google did.  I could contact them about the abuse, and will if there is more of it.  But it is very annoying to have an email system that’s so open to abuse and spoofing and takes time out of my day to deal with such petty junk pulled as a prank.  And we have no idea whether this was sent to any church members or anyone outside of the staff, and if it was…will they know enough to realize it’s a spoofed piece of junk?  I know there are email verification and authentication schemes out there, some good, some bad, and none universal.  There are big problems with most, and the likelihood of authenticated emails becoming a global practice anytime soon is not something I’m holding my breath for, but an IT guy can dream, can’t he?

Thanks for letting me vent, as much as my strong feelings have been held back above to prevent publishing anything I’ll later regret :-)