Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 01:56:55PM +0300, Rogelio wrote: On Apr 26, 2011, at 1:54 PM, Dorn Hetzel wrote: Would it turn out to be less expensive to just start a new subscription as if you never had one before? Usually places like this do it by serial number, in which case they don't let you update until you backpay. :) And don't forget the reinstating fees many companies charge too if you try to renew a month or 3 after the previous subscription has expired. -- Regards, Ulf. - Ulf Zimmermann, 1525 Pacific Ave., Alameda, CA-94501, #: 510-865-0204 You can find my resume at: http://www.Alameda.net/~ulf/resume.html
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On Apr 9, 2011, at 6:51 AM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. While I agree with you (in theory), in practice, lots of companies do this baloney and there is little you can do if you need their product. In fact, I just got screwed by this policy at Fluke Networks when I tried to renew my subscription to one of their tools.
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
While I agree with you (in theory), in practice, lots of companies do this baloney and there is little you can do if you need their product. In fact, I just got screwed by this policy at Fluke Networks when I tried to renew my subscription to one of their tools. Would it turn out to be less expensive to just start a new subscription as if you never had one before?
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On Apr 26, 2011, at 1:54 PM, Dorn Hetzel wrote: Would it turn out to be less expensive to just start a new subscription as if you never had one before? Usually places like this do it by serial number, in which case they don't let you update until you backpay. :)
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
Thanks to all for your suggestions. We've had several other problems with our Barracuda box as well including the fact that it is very under-powered and that the web interface for admin stuff seems to freeze up and only send partial http responses back after log queries. Think will probably move on to something else and abandon Barracuda Networks. I certainly would warn others away from their products based on my unpleasant experience.
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
I would look into Asatro, they have a solid product and good support. If you want a contact person let me know and I will email you directly. On 4/9/11 11:55 AM, pr...@cnsny.net wrote: Andrew, We use and offer Postini - a front end service. Postini is a anti virus and spam filter, and can spool mail if your circuits are down. Postini is a Google company and works like a charm. If you need more information please contact me offline pr...@cnsny.net Paul Sent from my Verizon Wireless Phone - Reply message - From: Andrew Kirchtrel...@trelane.net Date: Sat, Apr 9, 2011 10:39 am Subject: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative? To: John Palmer (NANOG Acct)nan...@adns.net,nanog@nanog.org John, My suggestion isn't _QUITE_ an appliance, but it works very well and I've been exceptionally happy with it. It's a distribution of linux controlled via a web interface that does far more than just mail filtering (at which it is both flexible and adept). Take a look at http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html. The hardware requirements shouldn't be too insane, and the rules updates/subscriptions for the various services are all month to month, and not a bucket of insane. Andrew On 4/8/2011 11:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
* Justin Scott: No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Hi John, this is actually a pretty common practice for service subscription models where the software and its components (spam filter rules in this case) are being continually updated. But it's not been updated during the sabbatical. In this regard, it's very different from crisis support services, where such a model is still obnoxious, but at least makes some sense. but you're going to benefit NOW from work that was done at that time (the un-paid period) AND all the future updates that come out during your new renewal period. Seems doubtful, given the volatility of filtering rules. -- Florian Weimerfwei...@bfk.de BFK edv-consulting GmbH http://www.bfk.de/ Kriegsstraße 100 tel: +49-721-96201-1 D-76133 Karlsruhe fax: +49-721-96201-99
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On 09/04/2011 10:37, Bryan Irvine wrote: As do some states with automotive registration. It's a quite normal practice. If you're in a monopoly or near-monopoly position, you can get away with screwing over your customer base. If you're in a competitive market, practices like support catch-up fees depend on a company's ability to trade on their customers' ignorance about what products are available in the market. Who knows, it may well work for this quarter or the next - but as a long term business proposition, it's quite corrosive to customer loyalty. Nick
RE: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
I wonder if there's a filter for top-postings in list that have a bottom-posting rule? This thread is very operationally interesting to me but I've lost the plot :( http://www.nanog.org/mailinglist/listfaqs/generalfaq.php?qt=convent refers. PS: I know that some devices actually prevent bottom-posting by default. Workarounds are possible and are evident in other recent posts to this list. Additionally, may I suggest you file a bug report with your vendors or switch to a device that you can control properly :) -- CTRL-d
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On 2011/04/09 11:38 AM, Phil Regnauld wrote: Tim Chown (tjc) writes: I don't know quite how high a performance you need. If it's just email spam/viruses you are concerned with, you can run MailScanner for free, see http://www.mailscanner.info. It's been around for 10 years now and used by a lot of big organisations, many of which are listed on the web site. Written by a colleague here at University of Southampton, hence the plug. If you install and run it yourself, there's a good community mail list for support and tips. ... or just run amavisd. MailScanner used to do Bad Things with the Postfix queue, but since then I think they have fixed that, but I will admit to not having any experience with it. I have 6 MailScanner servers in production running with Postfix, not had any 'real' issues in the last few years. As to amavisd: http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/ Have been using it on 1 million mails / day with satisfaction
RE: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On Mon, 11 Apr 2011, Ray Corbin wrote: rantI had experience with Barracuda as outbound anti-spam filters for a very large hosting provider and I won't use Barracuda again. Some of their methods for blocking spam are a tad extreme. At one point they decided to block both yahoo.com and google.com in their domain filters because neither company responded timely to their complaint emails and wanted their attention. Those both have pretty poor reputations for handling outgoing spam and other abuse issues. Yahoo is notorious for the the message in your complaint did not come from our servers response, when any idiot who can read headers can see that it clearly did come from their servers. They've gone a step beyond this recently by refusing to accept spam complaints to ab...@yahoo.com unless they're in ARF format. That raises the bar high enough that unless you have the skills to easily turn yahoo spam into ARF-compliant reports, you can no longer send them complaints when you receive spam from their servers. Google (gmail.com) is the only free-mail provider I'm aware of that hides the spammer's originating IP. All sorts of abuses seem to be tolerated there for much longer spans of time than you'd think it would take the brightest of the brightest to lock things down. i.e. URL redirectors used by spammers for months, phishing collectors reported to Google security, and nothing apparently done about them. Sometimes, the only way to get an appropriate reaction from an org that just doesn't seem to care about its abuse issues is to make those abuse issues cause them some pain. -- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net| _ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_
RE: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
I don't think they had blocked mail coming/going from yahoo.com/google.com which would have been more careless to their subscribers (especially when our outbound units were processing a few million emails a day from our customers). They blocked the domains so you couldn't have a link to google/yahoo in the body and then set that as an update for all of their devices. I believe it was something about a URL redirect on each site that spammers were using..but this was a several years ago so I don't recall exactly. -r -Original Message- From: Jon Lewis [mailto:jle...@lewis.org] Sent: Monday, April 11, 2011 7:56 AM To: Ray Corbin Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: RE: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative? On Mon, 11 Apr 2011, Ray Corbin wrote: rantI had experience with Barracuda as outbound anti-spam filters for a very large hosting provider and I won't use Barracuda again. Some of their methods for blocking spam are a tad extreme. At one point they decided to block both yahoo.com and google.com in their domain filters because neither company responded timely to their complaint emails and wanted their attention. Those both have pretty poor reputations for handling outgoing spam and other abuse issues. Yahoo is notorious for the the message in your complaint did not come from our servers response, when any idiot who can read headers can see that it clearly did come from their servers. They've gone a step beyond this recently by refusing to accept spam complaints to ab...@yahoo.com unless they're in ARF format. That raises the bar high enough that unless you have the skills to easily turn yahoo spam into ARF-compliant reports, you can no longer send them complaints when you receive spam from their servers. Google (gmail.com) is the only free-mail provider I'm aware of that hides the spammer's originating IP. All sorts of abuses seem to be tolerated there for much longer spans of time than you'd think it would take the brightest of the brightest to lock things down. i.e. URL redirectors used by spammers for months, phishing collectors reported to Google security, and nothing apparently done about them. Sometimes, the only way to get an appropriate reaction from an org that just doesn't seem to care about its abuse issues is to make those abuse issues cause them some pain. -- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net| _ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On Mon, 2011-04-11 at 12:10 +0200, Gabriel Marais wrote: I have 6 MailScanner servers in production running with Postfix, not had any 'real' issues in the last few years. We have just as many -- and yes, it's great. The only thing I'd prefer would be Exim over Postfix, but Mailscanner does make things very pleasant to use. Tom
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
We have just as many -- and yes, it's great. The only thing I'd prefer would be Exim over Postfix, but Mailscanner does make things very pleasant to use. +1 for Exim, although development stalled for a while when Philip Hazel retired its now back on track. Also not happy with Barracuda, have a couple of hosts which are blocked by their blocking list and they've refused to tell me why. Chris
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On Mon, 11 Apr 2011, Tom Hill wrote: On Mon, 2011-04-11 at 12:10 +0200, Gabriel Marais wrote: I have 6 MailScanner servers in production running with Postfix, not had any 'real' issues in the last few years. We have just as many -- and yes, it's great. The only thing I'd prefer would be Exim over Postfix, but Mailscanner does make things very pleasant to use. I think you guys are missing the point, which is that Barracuda and similar products are marketed primarily to people who don't know what qmail, postfix, exim, clamav, mailscanner, etc. are and certainly don't have any experience installing or maintaining them. Some places just want a black box where you have a web GUI to configure it, and then it mostly takes care of itself...and if it breaks, you call tech support. Sure, you can probably get most of the functionality and better filtering with roll your own solutions and careful DNSBL selection...but not everyone is capable or has the man power to devote to it. To most of us on this list, sure, it's an overpriced piece of commodity x86 hardware with someone else's roll your own stuff on it, backed by an ill-defined DNSBL of questionable quality and integrity, but it must work well enough as it's kept them in business and I even know a few people who've owned them and been happy with them. -- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net| _ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
Not an appliance but a really amazing job at stopping spam, www.messagelabs.com (purchased by Symantec). We went from messagelabs service to barracuda appliance and the difference is astronomical, whereas before i might get one or two spams a day using MessageLabs now with the barracuda I get an average of 25 to 30. -- Michael Gatti cell.703.347.4412 ekim.it...@gmail.com On Apr 8, 2011, at 11:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
TR Shaw wrote: Get a linux box or whatever and roll your own. ASSP, DSPAM, Spamassin, or other open source ASSP + exim, on Debian, for sure. BUT, ASSP as of now does not support IPv6 so I am not able to hang my spamfilter on an IPv6 address. :-( Contacting the maintainers is met with utter silence. Another proof there's still a long way to go to get people to change... Greetings, Jeroen -- http://goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/ http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
At Sunflower, we use Ironports for our mail filtering. Have been really happy with the product. The reason you explained is a reason we didn't go with Barracuda. On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Marc Runkel mrun...@untangle.com wrote: Ok, shameless plug here, but I invite you to check out our product @ www.untangle.comhttp://www.untangle.com. Base product (including anti-spam) is free. If you want support/web filtering/ or better spam rules they are available as premium add-ons. Marc Runkel Untangle, Inc. Director, Technical Operations (650) 425- direct (650) 345-3788 fax On Apr 8, 2011, at 8:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks
Re: Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
Because I don't need any of the cute and fluffy features like a quarantine spambox, I just use the barracuda rbl along with a few others. You get their filtering power for free and don't have to deal with the hardware, if you don't particularly like it. http://www.barracudacentral.org/ -- Fred
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
It's quite easy to build your own [out of open-source components] that easily outperforms any appliance on the market. (Which isn't saying much: none of them are very good, and all of them are way overpriced. The bar is thus set quite low.) It will not have all the superfluous bells and whistles that marketing departments are so fond of hyping, but it will work, it will be cheap, it will be scalable, and it will be far more secure. Is there any aspect of this screed that you can support with data, preferably data published this decade? Of course, I understand that overpriced and superfluous bells and whistles and far more secure are fairly subjective criteria, but numbers such as efficacy and specificity are easy to compare. I'd also be interested in hearing about any cases where someone compromised a production Barracuda, Ironport, or similar appliance--or does your definition of far more secure include other substantive components that matter more? I've discussed this at some length on mailop and am in the process of reducing it to near-cookbook form. If you're interested, contact me offlist and I'll outline it for you. I'd be interested in seeing you put your money where your mouth is regarding catch rate and false positive rate. Contact me off-list with a place where I can FTP a VM of one of your appliances. jms -- Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719 Senior Partner, Opus One Phone: +1 520 324 0494 j...@opus1.comhttp://www.opus1.com/jms
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
The best of them is A.S.S.P. and it works wonder I have deployed a couple and I love it Sent from my iPhone On Apr 10, 2011, at 12:46, Elijah Savage esav...@digitalrage.org wrote: FreeBSD, Postfix, Amavisd, Spamassassin, Clamav and TLS I have seen and deployed this combination as a mail relay to exchange both in and out of large organizations 35,000 plus hosting multiple domains as well as small organizations. With a few scripts it is essentially self containing very little maintenance. On Apr 8, 2011, at 11:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
I agree. Simple clean perl proxy. Lots of GUI config. Can use ClamAV and other AV systems. Easy to deploy. Is no brainer to manage. Comes in single and multithreaded. Your call. I get a lot of email through the single thread version. Handles TLS and more. http://sourceforge.net/projects/assp/files/ On Apr 10, 2011, at 6:07 PM, Joshua Klubi wrote: The best of them is A.S.S.P. and it works wonder I have deployed a couple and I love it Sent from my iPhone On Apr 10, 2011, at 12:46, Elijah Savage esav...@digitalrage.org wrote: FreeBSD, Postfix, Amavisd, Spamassassin, Clamav and TLS I have seen and deployed this combination as a mail relay to exchange both in and out of large organizations 35,000 plus hosting multiple domains as well as small organizations. With a few scripts it is essentially self containing very little maintenance. On Apr 8, 2011, at 11:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On 4/9/2011 12:46 PM, Marc Runkel wrote: Ok, shameless plug here, but I invite you to check out our product @ www.untangle.comhttp://www.untangle.com. Base product (including anti-spam) is free. If you want support/web filtering/ or better spam rules they are available as premium add-ons. Marc Runkel Untangle, Inc. Director, Technical Operations (650) 425- direct (650) 345-3788 fax On Apr 8, 2011, at 8:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks Untangle's free version...isn't worth the bandwidth. The paid version is ok..but it's a resource hog.
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
A barracuda appliance uses postfix, amavisd-new, spamassassin with fuzzyOCR and clamav. I've built a couple of these boxes for customers. I use their dnsbl as well as spamhaus. It works pretty well, not much gets through. --Curtis On 4/10/2011 8:24 PM, William Warren wrote: On 4/9/2011 12:46 PM, Marc Runkel wrote: Ok, shameless plug here, but I invite you to check out our product @ www.untangle.comhttp://www.untangle.com. Base product (including anti-spam) is free. If you want support/web filtering/ or better spam rules they are available as premium add-ons. Marc Runkel Untangle, Inc. Director, Technical Operations (650) 425- direct (650) 345-3788 fax On Apr 8, 2011, at 8:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks Untangle's free version...isn't worth the bandwidth. The paid version is ok..but it's a resource hog.
RE: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
I also use postini and it works really well for my current needs. rantI had experience with Barracuda as outbound anti-spam filters for a very large hosting provider and I won't use Barracuda again. Some of their methods for blocking spam are a tad extreme. At one point they decided to block both yahoo.com and google.com in their domain filters because neither company responded timely to their complaint emails and wanted their attention...not to mention their buggy 'spam engine' that died many times causing mail to error with 'failure to connect to 127.0.0.1'... I especially loved their tier 1's response of how the issue is on the recipients end because they couldn't telnet to mail.domain.com from their workstation...I had to first explain how mail.domain.com wasn’t the MX record for domain.com (it ironically was a postini MX record) and that it was obvious when thousands of messages sit in the inbound queue saying 'failure to connect to 127.0.0.1' meant their engine died and their 'watchdog' process failed to restart it. To me their Tier 1 unable to do the basics was pretty unacceptable. /rant -r -Original Message- From: pr...@cnsny.net [mailto:pr...@cnsny.net] Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2011 11:56 AM To: Andrew Kirch; John Palmer (NANOG Acct); nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative? Andrew, We use and offer Postini - a front end service. Postini is a anti virus and spam filter, and can spool mail if your circuits are down. Postini is a Google company and works like a charm. If you need more information please contact me offline pr...@cnsny.net Paul Sent from my Verizon Wireless Phone - Reply message - From: Andrew Kirch trel...@trelane.net Date: Sat, Apr 9, 2011 10:39 am Subject: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative? To: John Palmer (NANOG Acct) nan...@adns.net, nanog@nanog.org John, My suggestion isn't _QUITE_ an appliance, but it works very well and I've been exceptionally happy with it. It's a distribution of linux controlled via a web interface that does far more than just mail filtering (at which it is both flexible and adept). Take a look at http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html. The hardware requirements shouldn't be too insane, and the rules updates/subscriptions for the various services are all month to month, and not a bucket of insane. Andrew On 4/8/2011 11:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
Juniper does this also. Jeff On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) nan...@adns.net wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks -- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.l...@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications - AS32421 First and Leading in DDoS Protection Solutions
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On 9 Apr 2011, at 04:56, Dobbins, Roland wrote: On Apr 9, 2011, at 10:51 AM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used http://www.ironport.com/ I don't know quite how high a performance you need. If it's just email spam/viruses you are concerned with, you can run MailScanner for free, see http://www.mailscanner.info.It's been around for 10 years now and used by a lot of big organisations, many of which are listed on the web site.Written by a colleague here at University of Southampton, hence the plug. If you install and run it yourself, there's a good community mail list for support and tips. If you want a commercial version then Fort Systems (http://www.fsl.com) can do that, and they also have a companion product BarricadeMX that's a pretty decent pre-filter system. Tim
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
As do some states with automotive registration. It's a quite normal practice. -B On Apr 9, 2011, at 12:19 AM, Jeffrey Lyon jeffrey.l...@blacklotus.net wrote: Juniper does this also. Jeff On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) nan...@adns.net wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks -- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.l...@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications - AS32421 First and Leading in DDoS Protection Solutions
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
Tim Chown (tjc) writes: I don't know quite how high a performance you need. If it's just email spam/viruses you are concerned with, you can run MailScanner for free, see http://www.mailscanner.info. It's been around for 10 years now and used by a lot of big organisations, many of which are listed on the web site. Written by a colleague here at University of Southampton, hence the plug. If you install and run it yourself, there's a good community mail list for support and tips. ... or just run amavisd. MailScanner used to do Bad Things with the Postfix queue, but since then I think they have fixed that, but I will admit to not having any experience with it. As to amavisd: http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/ Have been using it on 1 million mails / day with satisfaction
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
- Original Message - From: Jeffrey Lyon jeffrey.l...@blacklotus.net [ Charging back rent on your appliance ] Juniper does this also. To pick a slightly different milieu, the Zimbra email system does not; if you let your support contract lapse, you simply aren't entitled to support while it's inactive. Or at least, that's how it was while I cared. :-) Cheers, -- jra
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
It's quite easy to build your own [out of open-source components] that easily outperforms any appliance on the market. (Which isn't saying much: none of them are very good, and all of them are way overpriced. The bar is thus set quite low.) It will not have all the superfluous bells and whistles that marketing departments are so fond of hyping, but it will work, it will be cheap, it will be scalable, and it will be far more secure. I've discussed this at some length on mailop and am in the process of reducing it to near-cookbook form. If you're interested, contact me offlist and I'll outline it for you. ---rsk
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On Apr 8, 2011, at 11:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Get a linux box or whatever and roll your own. ASSP, DSPAM, Spamassin, or other open source Tom
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
John, My suggestion isn't _QUITE_ an appliance, but it works very well and I've been exceptionally happy with it. It's a distribution of linux controlled via a web interface that does far more than just mail filtering (at which it is both flexible and adept). Take a look at http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html. The hardware requirements shouldn't be too insane, and the rules updates/subscriptions for the various services are all month to month, and not a bucket of insane. Andrew On 4/8/2011 11:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
Andrew, We use and offer Postini - a front end service. Postini is a anti virus and spam filter, and can spool mail if your circuits are down. Postini is a Google company and works like a charm. If you need more information please contact me offline pr...@cnsny.net Paul Sent from my Verizon Wireless Phone - Reply message - From: Andrew Kirch trel...@trelane.net Date: Sat, Apr 9, 2011 10:39 am Subject: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative? To: John Palmer (NANOG Acct) nan...@adns.net, nanog@nanog.org John, My suggestion isn't _QUITE_ an appliance, but it works very well and I've been exceptionally happy with it. It's a distribution of linux controlled via a web interface that does far more than just mail filtering (at which it is both flexible and adept). Take a look at http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html. The hardware requirements shouldn't be too insane, and the rules updates/subscriptions for the various services are all month to month, and not a bucket of insane. Andrew On 4/8/2011 11:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
Ok, shameless plug here, but I invite you to check out our product @ www.untangle.comhttp://www.untangle.com. Base product (including anti-spam) is free. If you want support/web filtering/ or better spam rules they are available as premium add-ons. Marc Runkel Untangle, Inc. Director, Technical Operations (650) 425- direct (650) 345-3788 fax On Apr 8, 2011, at 8:51 PM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say Oh, you are at your anniversary date, and renew me for a year? No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours. I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46 My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use. Thanks
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
On Apr 9, 2011, at 10:51 AM, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used http://www.ironport.com/ --- Roland Dobbins rdobb...@arbor.net // http://www.arbornetworks.com The basis of optimism is sheer terror. -- Oscar Wilde
Re: Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?
No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Hi John, this is actually a pretty common practice for service subscription models where the software and its components (spam filter rules in this case) are being continually updated. Essentially the way Barracuda sees it is that you bought the product and paid for a service contract for X period of time and they provided software and filter updates during that period. You chose not to renew, so they stopped providing updates. Now you want to renew again from today forward which means you're going to get the same benefits as customers who kept their contracts current (i.e. all the software upgrades and updated filters) without contributing to their development. Granted you didn't get them at the time they came out, but you're going to benefit NOW from work that was done at that time (the un-paid period) AND all the future updates that come out during your new renewal period. Basically, what they're saying is that if you want to get those benefits, you have to pay for them by renewing from the point where you lapsed. If a NEW customer signed on right now, they have to make an initial purchase which contributes both to the original development and potentially covers their service plan for some period as well. They're not trying to rip you off, they're just making sure everyone pays their share for those accrued benefits. You just have to look at it from the standpoint of whether it is cheaper for you to renew your service versus the initial purchase cost for a new customer with new service. Some companies won't let you renew your service at all if it's been expired for some period and force you to sign up as a new customer again, so at least they're giving you that option. Look at it from the provider's point of view and ask yourself how you would run the business and what you're trying to do will suddenly look like a potential loophole that could be abused and needs to be addressed. -Justin
