Return of the Message Center and More

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As Google continues to migrate Google Message Security and Message Discovery customers from the old Postini infrastructure, our clients have been concerned about functional and performance equivalency.   While filters and settings have been comparable for a while, and Google had previously added the quarantine notification, Google today announced the new Message Center.

Specifically for users that forward some or all of their email to on-premise servers or other email services, the Message Center lets users and administrators:

  • View and search 30 days of clean/spam mail
  • Mark single or multiple messages as spam or not spam
  • Deliver messages that are not spam to the on-premise mailbox
  • Add and remove contacts for whitelisting purposes
  • Bookmark URLs for searches and individual messages

This expanded functionality coincides with a series of upgrades to the SMTP relay service in Google Apps.   These updates help administrators in several ways:

  • Multiple authentication configurations: Admins can now configure multiple sets of authentication rules. For instance, you can specify that messages sent from one IP address are always allowed, messages from another IP address are only allowed if encrypted with TLS, and messages from another IP address range require SMTP AUTH.
  • SMTP AUTH: This newly supported authentication method uses Google “application-specific passwords” to allow admins to configure clients to authenticate to the relay service. This feature is available for registered Google Apps users only.
  • IP range description field: To manage IP addresses more efficiently, admins can enter descriptions in text fields for each IP address or range that you use to set authentication rules.
  • Selective enable/disable of IP ranges: Admins can selectively enable/disable IP ranges approved for relay as needed
  • Increased rate-limits for certain customers: In special circumstances, admins may increase the rate limits of 2,000 emails/user/day and 2,000 recipients/user/day by calling customer support. Requests need justification and are reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

With these enhancements, Google continues to increase the robustness of the Google Apps Platform, and reduces the need for most GMS and GMD customers to move to other spam, virus, and archiving solutions.