Caution! Don't attempt the Postini to Google Apps transition

[Matthew Kaufman <matthew () matthew at>]

TL; DR: Email won't be delivered, No support

I have two domains that I set up with Postini for spam filtering, and I 
was very happy for years. But Google purchased Postini, and has been 
increasingly insistent that I migrate to Google Apps. They have a 
transition process which is supposedly seamless, and which guarantees 
that mail will continue flowing throughout the transition. In reality, 
all of my email was offline for 24 hours, first into a black hole, and 
then bouncing with permanent failures.

Calling Google support last night resulted in a long wait to finally 
talk to someone who told me that Postini support was too busy and who 
took down my name and number for a call back. Never got a call.

This morning I opened a support ticket via the web site, and two hours 
later got a reply suggesting that it might be my MX records. Never mind 
that (according to the logs I could see) the mail was still flowing 
properly to Postini, passing through there to Google, and then being 
dumped at Google.

When I called to escalate, I found a support agent who couldn't find the 
ticket I had opened via the website, and who then tried to transfer me. 
In the process, I sat on hold for 30 minutes, then the call was dropped.

When I called right back, I went through the same phone tree and 
authentication process, and reached another agent. When he asked my 
problem, and I started to describe it, he said "oh, Postini" and then 
hung up on me.

At that point it had been 24 hours, which is too long to have one's 
inbound email getting permanent failures, and so I've set my MX records 
to point directly at my own servers and will just live without spam 
filtering for a while. In the meantime, I strongly encourage anyone else 
who cares about reliable email delivery to avoid my fate.

Matthew Kaufman
matthew () matthew at