The Barracuda appliance is a godsend. Pain in the neck setup due to no direct
support for platforms other than MS Exchange, but once you get it going, it's
great. They give you a 30 day trial to setup and test the appliance with
unlimited access to tech support. Their feeling is that if you get to use it
for 30 days, you won't want to send it back.
In Imail, we have stopped using premium antispam, antivirus, phrase filtering,
URL filtering, SPF checks, STAT filters etc. Too many false positives with
most of the Imail spam and virus utilities to bother with anymore.
As a consequence of using primarily the Barracuda, there has been an increase
in the amount spam getting to end users inboxes. We found that the Bayesian
filtering options are next to worthless due to poisoning attacks, so we use
everything else possible in the barracuda. Even with the spam increase to end
users, we're still stopping more than 99.9% of the crap being sent to our
domain. The configuarble white lists, black lists, built in antivirus and
reporting tools, make the Barracuda well worth the money.
A fringe benefit, that I couldn't get easily from Imail, is the ability to
quickly check the last 30 days to see if any particular message(s) ever
actually reached our domain. Very helpful for diagnosing problems.
We've coupled our Barracuda appliance with a standard Google email account.
You can set the spam scoring criteria in the Barracuda to determine real,
possible, quarantineable and definite spam. A little research helps you find
the right levels for your organization. Questionable messages, that get
quarantined by the barracuda for any reason, get sent to Gmail. I setup a rule
in our Gmail account to send all messages to the trash folder, where they get
auto-deleted after 30 days. The setup works like a charm. I can go in and do
research for missing emails anytime I want and forward the lost emails either
from the barracuda queue or the Gmail trash.
We're still trying to find ways to increase the effectiveness of the Barracuda
appliance, but for now, good enough is better than getting yelled at for too
many false positives. I continually instruct users to forward any spam that
reaches them to an email address at barracuda networks for reporting reasons.
Barracuda seems to be about 3 months behind some of the weirder techniques used
to slip messages by filters. But we figure that as long as the viruses and
really nasty things get stopped right away, we're doing good.
Hope this note from the trenches helps. Don't know how well other products
work. But we love our Barracuda.
-Joe
-----Original Message-----
From: "Travis Rabe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent 10/8/2007 12:55:23 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [IMail Forum] OT: Barracuda 200/400All, For those of you using
Barracuda appliance, may I get
your feedback on your experience. Ease of use? Versus Imail
Premium? Versus Symantec Mail Security? Versus anything else?
Reliability? Regards, Travis
