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When using Postini for spam filtering, is it a requirement that I enter email addresses in Postini for each of my users? Or can you avoid specifying any users and just use a "generic" set of rules?

If it turns out there's no requirement for entering each user's email address in Postini, what are the benefits of opting to do so vs. not?

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You should look into Postini's SmartCreate option. When enabled, users will be automatically created if they receive three messages in a two week period. Until that time they're unable to access the Message Center, but those three messages will appear in their archive once their account exists.

The advantage of SmartCreate is that you don't have to create users in both your mail system and in Postini, which can mean not having to figure out how to programatically provision users. The disadvantage is that Postini cannot reject mail for non-existent addresses immediately, as it doesn't know if they exist or not.

For us it works well as we've implemented Postini in a non-standard way by putting it behind our corporate mail routing infrastructure which already rejects mail to non-existent addresses. If I was putting Postini on the border as is recommended I'd be programatically provisioning users. For our scenario SmartCreate is more convenient.

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@Robert - By not being able to reject mail for non-existent addresses what problem(s) is it creating? Also I suppose a couple of the disadvantages of not having your users defined in Postini are obviously that you won't have per-user quarantines, access to individual message center, can't define per user settings if I wanted and so on. Is that correct or are any more biggies I am missing? – Howiecamp Nov 26 '10 at 5:18
@Howiecamp If you can reject mail for non-existent addresses at the border then your mail system can avoid accepting it and generating a bounce. Depending on the volume of mail your site receives that can result in a huge reduction in load. At the very least you don't have to generate and send a bounce, but you also might be able to avoid additional scanning/processing costs. – Robert Norris Nov 26 '10 at 8:17
@Howiecamp: SmartCreate will create full users accounts eventually, so you'll get quarantines, message center, per-user settings, etc. The users just don't get an account until a few messages have arrived for them. – Robert Norris Nov 26 '10 at 8:18
@Robert - it might be right in front of but I'm looking at your SmartCreate link and I'm not seeing "General Setting on the Orgs and Users tab. I've looked at all levels in the hierarchy as well. – Howiecamp Dec 8 '10 at 22:36
@Howiecamp: To find it I go to my user org page, "Organization Settings", "General Settings". The option is called "Automatic account creation". – Robert Norris Dec 9 '10 at 20:35
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