Postini was an

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

, Web security, and archiving service owned by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

since 2007. It provided

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...

services for filtering

e-mail spam Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoida ...

and malware (before it was delivered to a client's

mail server Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP. The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host ...

), offered optional e-mail archiving, and protected client networks from web-borne malware.

History

Postini was a

startup company A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend ...

founded in 1999 by Shinya Akamine, Gordon Irlam, Brian Maggi, and Scott Petry in

Redwood City, California Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California's Bay Area, approximately south of San Francisco, and northwest of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people to being a ...

, United States. It was backed by

August Capital August Capital, legally August Capital Master Management Company, LLC, is a venture capital firm founded by David Marquardt and John Johnston in 1995. It is focused on information technology and is based in Menlo Park, California. Company Aug ...

, with second-round funding from August as well as Summit Partners Accelerator Fund and Sun Microsystems. By February 2005, it was operating ten U.S. data centers, processing 2.5 billion e-mail messages weekly, and providing anti-spam services for more than 4,200 companies and "6 million end users, including workers at Merrill Lynch, Circuit City, Rayovac, and

Hormel Foods Hormel Foods Corporation is an American food processing company founded in 1891 in Austin, Minnesota, by George A. Hormel as George A. Hormel & Company. The company originally focused on the packaging and selling of ham, sausage and other pork ...

, the company that makes Spam, the canned meat product". Later in 2005 it moved to nearby San Carlos, California. As of 2012, the number of processed emails is estimated to have been doubled around two times, and Google has added data centers in the EU to better serve its European customers. On July 9, 2007, Google announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Postini. Google paid $625 million in cash for the acquisition. The former company's services were then marketed as "Google Postini Services". In September 2011, Google announced it would discontinue a number of its products, including Google Web Security, which was acquired by Google as part of Postini. On August 21, 2012, Google announced it would be shutting down all of Postini's web services and folding the service's users into

Google Apps Google Workspace (formerly known as Google Apps and later G Suite) is a collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It consists of Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Meet ...

. After a multi-year migration effort, the last customers were migrated to Google Apps in the second half of 2015.

References

{{Google LLC Spam filtering Anti-spam Google acquisitions Computer-related introductions in 1999 Cloud applications Service-oriented (business computing) 2014 disestablishments in California Internet properties disestablished in 2014 Discontinued Google acquisitions

History

See also

References