In a week in which Symantec paid over half a billion dollars to buy a SaaS e-mail archiving service, Google Postini announced that they would now extend their email archiving retention period to a maximum of 10 years.

The Postini announcement is actually a non-announcement. I mean why would you consider using an archiving service that cannot keep content for archival lengths of time? Yet, this Seinfeld-like (it's about nothing) announcement got as much if not more coverage and pick up than the MessageLabs announcement.

There is no denying the power of a brand, and Google's brand is about as big as it gets. But the danger here that we can slip into an Orwellian world where news equals nothing, and that real news get's ignored. So just to be clear on this, ALL e-mail archiving systems should store mail for archival lengths of time, in some cases 20 years plus. If they can't they should not be touched with the proverbial bargepole.

To be sure, the Google Postini offering is one of the more intriguing offerings out there, though it certainly has its weakness as we detail in our technical evaluation of it. But its strengths may surprise you, they surprised us.