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I know, I know: I’ve already had a blog post about spam. This is the last one for a while, I promise.  It just continues to be subject that rears it’s ugly head, forcing me to deal with it even when I think I have it solved.

For a while now, I’ve been moving my clients over to Google’s Postini spam filtering service when SpamAssassin isn’t doing the trick (typically for marketing firms that have a large contact base, spreading their contact information around the globe).  For those that aren’t familiar with Postini, it’s a subscription based hosted spam/virus filtering service.  You point your MX records at Postini’s servers, give them your WAN IP address, and they will act as a proxy to filter your email traffic through.  Easy stuff.

The default configuration works pretty well, but for those of you who would like to make adjustments, they have a nice administration console interface where you can make whitelist/blacklist modifications, perform content filtering and manage email size limits.  For me, it’s been a nice set-it-and-forget-it solution that I rarely had to make adjustments on, or even worry about – until recently.

Last Wednesday, two of my clients contacted me

about emails they received from Google suspending their Postini service, which coincided with a major increase in the amount of spam they were receiving.  After doing some major research on Google’s support forum (the cancellation email had no helpful information whatsoever), I found that the auto-renewal had not kicked in for these clients due to their credit card info having changed.  Okay, easy fix right?  Not so fast.

I went ahead and hopped on over to Google Checkout and logged in with the credentials created when the service was first setup for them, with no problem.  However, after updating their credit card info, I clicked on the manual renew link on their Postini account page, thinking that it would step me through charging the new card.  This link took me to Google Apps, which I was not expecting. After trying the Google Checkout login credentials there, I was redirected to a page saying that my domain had not been setup for Google Apps.  Following the steps to setup the domain (including adding a unique CNAME to the company’s domain record), I was met with a brick wall every time.

At this point I found a number for Postini support on one of Google’s forums.  I called that number and spoke with a gentleman who informed me that he couldn’t help, and he directed me to Google’s online support request page.  So, I filled out a support form, sounding slightly perturbed in the issue description.  I immediately got an automated response back with some suggestions that I had already tried, so I replied back to it stating that my problem was still unresolved.

After two days, I finally heard back from an actual Google support rep.

Apparently, they have been fielding a lot of these issues this past week.  He went ahead and setup Google Apps accounts for my clients and temporarily reactivated their spam filtering.  With the newly created Google Apps accounts in hand, I was able to get in and complete the billing process pretty effortlessly (with one hangup with the security code on one card).

While I’m glad to have my clients back up and running, I am still puzzled as to why Google decided that a Google Apps account was necessary to complete this process; especially since it was not required when these clients signed up for the service.  I’m also still not sure why Google doesn’t have a support phone number you can call for situations like this, especially now that they actually sell a telephone.  I understand that for a lot of things, new communications technology can speed up the support process. But it would be nice if they would just realize that there are times when being able to talk with someone on the phone would make things a whole lot easier.

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About Iris Professional Services
Iris Professional Services is a computer consulting company operating offices in both Seattle and Portland. Businesses throughout the Pacific Northwest rely on our expert IT consultants for all their network IT support services.