Customers of Google Apps Premier Edition now have more e-mail security for the suite of hosted applications. Google announced Wednesday it's now integrating security features from Postini, the company it purchased in July for $625 million in cash. The Postini deal officially closed last month.

"We had a goal of getting the product integration and capabilities out to the customer base as expediently as possible," Matthew Glotzbach, director of enterprise products at Google, told InternetNews.com.

Postini's software services protect, encrypt, archive and enforce policies for e-mail, instant messaging and other Web-based communications. The Google suite, available for $50 per user annually, already includes Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets and Personal Start Page – and now Postini's policy and message recovery features.

Glotzbach noted that GMail already has "really good" spam filtering that's now complemented by Postini to give enterprise customers the ability to set rules and implement policies about other types of e-mail. For example, Postini adds the ability to block certain keywords or attachments or specific types of attachments; a finance department might not want to allow spreadsheet attachments to be sent without authorization.

"The important point from our view is that we're able to provide an enterprise class application that can be maintained at any level whether it's company-wide, for a certain group or individuals," said Glotzbach.

Google also announced it's boosted the available e-mail storage in Gmail for Apps Premier users to 25 GB, at no additional charge, from the previous limit of 10 GB. While that's an enormous amount of storage for e-mail, the addition of Postini's message recovery feature is designed to help administrators and users who accidentally, or for any reason, delete e-mail they later wish to recover. With "recovery," deleted e-mails will still be available for retrieval for up to 90 days. "There are also tools for administrators to search across an entire company's archive of e-mail over those 90 days when legal compliance or other issues come up," said Glotzbach.

Administrators can also set rules on where e-mail should be delivered so that, for example, it can be sent to both a Gmail and a legacy e-mail account, or cordon off a certain group within the company to only get it one way. Glotzbach said certain enterprise customers doing pilots of Apps Premier have requested such flexibility.

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