The other main Postini services -- Message Discovery, Message Continuity and Message Encryption, for e-mail archiving, replication and compliance, respectively -- are not affected by Friday's announcement, the spokesman said.

In the coming weeks, Apps administrators will see the first two Postini features being moved to the Apps management console: the Objectionable Content and Content Compliance e-mail security settings.

These two features are designed to let Apps administrators automatically flag e-mail messages that contain certain words, phrases and text or numerical patterns.

"And because these are built into the Google Apps infrastructure, admins will be able to use their existing user and organization structures set up for their domain to customize policies for different groups," Dawes wrote.

The new e-mail security features will be made available to the Education, Business and Government editions of Apps, but not to its standard edition, which is limited to 10 users.