Our spam & virus filtering service, Postini, has been experiencing some performance issues this week. Many users are experiencing slow response times, or even time-outs when connecting to their Postini spam quarantine.

Postini is aware of this issue and are taking steps to address it. They expect the issues to be resolved early next week.

Thanks for your patience.

A number of people reported last week that they had received the Postini spam filtering "Welcome" message even though they had been using the service for some time. It appears that the problem is recurring this morning. These messages appear to come from "postmaster@forest.net" and have the subject line: "digital.forest has Activated your New Mail Services!"

We have talked with Postini, and the problem is with their database that tracks whether or not this message has already been sent to an account. They are aware of the problem, and are working on fixing it. In the meantime, you can ignore the message -- your password has not been reset, and your account is still working normally. It is simply a superfluous message.

We are aware that many of our customers are receiving new copies of the Postini welcome message. We don't yet know why this is happening, but we have a question in to the Postini support group, and will let you know what's going on as soon as they reply. Thank you for your patience.

From Postini's support site:

DNS issues are preventing some email servers from successfully establishing a connection to Postini and some users from accessing the message center. This behavior is not consistent. Postini has taken steps to resolve this issue. We will post updates here as they become available.

The situation seems to have improved somewhat from yesterday, but it has not yet been fully resolved. We will update when we have more information from Postini.

The Postini system's login page is temporarily inaccessible, at least from some parts of the network. It is filtering and delivering mail properly, but at present, you may not be able to log into the message center or admin pages. We will be investigating the problem, and hope to have it resolved tomorrow.

We received the following message today from Postini, which affects all users of our Postini spam filtering service:

Postini is pleased to announce that the next release of Postini's email perimeter protection service is scheduled to rollout on Thursday, August 1st. This release will incorporate several enhancements to the Message Center and its settings, based on the feedback from you and your users. The rollout of this new functionality will not interrupt your Postini services. You will see these changes late in the day on Thursday, August 1st.

The key enhancements in this release include:

- Enhanced spam filter controls, giving users increased flexibility to personalize the filters.

- A more intuitive and streamlined process to automate approving senders and mailing lists after a message is delivered and read.

- Improved trash functionality, including the ability to empty the trash.

- New, cleaner message center layout.

- The ability to delete all messages at once.