A user is an email account on your mail server that’s been added to the Postini Compliance Services. Once a user is added to the service, its email begins to be filtered by the service’s data center.

Each user is placed in an organization and receives the org-level settings configured for that org—such as a support address, administrator, or email policy. It receives its initial user-level settings, such as filter and virus settings, from a Default User. Some of these settings can later be changed for an individual user—either by you in the Administration Console, or by the user at the Message Center. For recommendations on what settings should or should not be changed for individual users, see What Settings Are Made Where.

A user’s filtered spam and viruses can be placed in a Quarantine, where an administrator can review and manage them. You can quarantine each user’s suspicious messages in a separate User Quarantine, or set up a central Quarantine for all users’ messages. If you quarantine each user’s messages separately, you can give users access to the Message Center where they can log in to view their own filtered spam and viruses, retrieve any legitimate messages that were wrongfully quarantined, and optionally manage other settings, such as their own filter levels, and sender lists.

An administrator is a user that’s been assigned privileges to manage one or more organizations.