Barracuda Spam Firewall is an excellent appliance which takes open source apps like spamassasin and clamav and builds an extremely easy to manage web GUI. Barracuda maintains their own virus definitions. The barracuda appliance is for corporate use and I'd say you need to be running your own email server with at least 100 or more users to make it cost-effective. The 300 spam firewall model has per-user quarantine which allows each individual user to classify messages in their quarantine as SPAM or NOT SPAM thus training the bayesian filter. 400 model adds RAID. One downside the barracuda scans only incoming messages for viruses. However, I was told as of Feb 2005 basically you just buy another barracuda appliance and upon setting it up you can choose incoming or outgoing mode.


Daily Mail Statiscs looks basically the same as hourly. Gives a good general overview to monitor if too many are being tagged or quarantined.

Had to cut off screenshot...for message also gives Reason, Score, Source IP and has Preferences button.

Non sosphisticated users have trouble setting up their own client based rules/filters so I didn't use Subject Tag. Quarantine score obviously you start out high and once you start training the Bayesian database then you can lower it to say 3.5. As long as your users don't complain more than say 2% of legitimate emails end up in their quarantine. Users also have the ability to whitelist email addresses so they'll get through if for whatever reason they keep ending up in their quarantine.

Virus checking initially had trouble with certain archive attachments but now it's really excellent.

You could do global quarantine and then it'd be up to a single email administrator to classify which messages are spam and not spam. Highly recommend to enable per-user quarantine and it's up to them to reduce amount of spam ended up in their INBOXes.

To setup you just change your MX (mail transfer) record in your Domain record to point to the barracuda's IP and in the Destination Mail Server just put you IP of your existing email server.

Message Log Privacy is extremely helpful (doesn't show entire message but just enough) for the email administrator to go through and get a detailed view of which messages are getting quarantine, blocked, tag or allowed through.

Barracuda Bayesian Learning is probably the most important tool to combat spam. Spammer techniques will always change and evolve so having the ability to classify messages as spam you enable the barracuda to properly filter and reduce new spam that has made it past existing spam databases. Don't forget it's just as important to classify messages as Not Spam.

Blacklists cut down on a huge amount of spam and are a big part of the overall equation of discarding unwanted spam emails. Don't get too carried away as they are quite a bit of other blacklists but the default ones do a pretty decent job.

IP Block/Accept, Sender Domain Block/Accept, Email Sender Block/Accept, Email Recipient Block/Accept all pretty much have the same configuration allowing you to Block, Quarantine, or Tag if they meet the criteria you set.

Attachment Filtering assists in keeping out many known destructive email attachments.

Subject Filtering, Body Filtering, and Header Filtering all have the same configuration setup.

Account Overview I didn't show (due to privacy issues) but basically it lists all users and you can view their quarantined messages if they need assistance, etc. A user isn't added unless they've had at least one message quarantined. Users section is pretty much self-explanatory.

Highly recommend to Email New User(s) so they know they have messages waiting in their quarantine inbox.

Do before a firmware update.

Domains just add them and the IP of the mail server. LDAP in my experience doesn't work well on non MS Exchange Mail Servers. All it's doing is if the email address is bogus saves it from the mail server from processing it.

SPF by popular demand. Incoming SMTP Timeout forces the sending relay mail server to wait 30 seconds before sending. Many spam relays who send out millions a day don't want to wait around.

Rate Control helps elminate or substantially reduce your email server from mail bombing.

Highly recommended before doing a firmware update.

Automatic hourly updates for both Spam Definitions and Virus Definitions....nice.

Download new firmware and wait a minute or so and it'll reboot and you'll be ready to go. Simple as that.

Many wish to archive permenant logs may do so with syslog.

SSL you can have your remote users, login securely to manage their quarantine inbox. Save some cash and generate a Private (self-signed) certificate.

China...hmmm..reminds me of the movie with Richard Gere called Red Corner.

Easily customize your own Banned File messages

Common network troubleshooting utilities in a nice web-gui.

Reports show a nice graphical overview of the barracuda statistical spam filtering, viruses, etc.
Report Type: Top Spam Senders, Top Spam Senders, Top Spam Recipients, Top Email Recipients, Top Viruses, Top Rate Controlled
Chart Type: Pie, Vertical Bars or Horizontal Bars

Updated Jun 25, 2005


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