Google Gives E-Mail More Firepower

After plunking down $625 million to acquire Postini, Google is rolling some of Postini's security tools into its e-mail client to better entice corporate users. Besides gunning for the search and Office apps, Google will now also be gunning for the Outlook juggernaut.

Google is adding improved security tools like message filtering and quarantine, anti-virus, and anti-spam to its e-mail system. It will also be more than doubling the size of individual mailboxes, going from 10GB to 25GB. This is for the corporate e-mail accounts that are part of Google's suite of online apps, not the everyday Gmail accounts which remain largely unchanged.

Google hopes to retain as many former corporate Postini customers as possible. More than 11 million individual Postini customers from more than 36,000 businesses have been able to use the Google suite of online apps for free since the acquisition, and can continue to do so through June 2008. After that, Google hopes to convert them to paying customers, bucking up the annual $50 per user fee.

Have you tried Google's online apps? Have you considered them? Are you using or considering any other Office alternatives? We'd love to hear from you at [email protected].

Posted by Lafe Low on October 03, 2007


Featured