Barracuda sinks teeth into spam

Spam Firewall 300 combines Bayesian filtering, solid management to net unwanted e-mail

Many anti-spam products have a similar ranking system, but I’ve always had to tweak and fine-tune them for weeks to optimize accuracy. The Spam Firewall is very accurate out of the box — at most, administrators may need to add a few legitimate bulk e-mail senders to a whitelist.

The Spam Firewall allows its major functionalities — anti-spam, anti-virus, quarantining, and notification — to be set for a global community or per user. The latter is useful if administrators want end-users to maintain their own personal whitelists. Administrators can set up their own blacklists or use predefined common blacklists; Barracuda Networks also offers its own custom blacklist.

As another layer of security, LDAP communications can be enabled for Microsoft Exchange servers to verify recipients if a spammer is mining for potential victims.

Other notable features include RFC 821 compliance, rate controls, and attachment filtering. Administrators can even block or quarantine password-protected archive files, such as PKZipped files, which comes in handy with some of the latest e-mail worms.

Updates are frequent; during my trial period, operational firmware updates were sent at least once per week if not several times per week — yes, some were bug fixes. But administrators can choose when to download new code and run updates. Anti-virus and spam definitions are separate from the firmware updates and can automatically update hourly or daily depending on your preference. The Spam Firewall even has a handy roll-back feature in case the new firmware or definitions cause problems.

Three spots to mend

Barracuda has created an impressive spam fighter, but the appliance does have three moderate weaknesses.

The first is Barracuda’s lack of detailed documentation. The Spam Firewall is packed with good features, but unless the user is already familiar with a particular feature, it may take a call to tech support to figure out exactly what it does. 

A related complaint is that the Barracuda Networks’ Web site is devoid of any useful tech support information, often requiring a call or e-mail to tech support for basic configuration help when a decent online FAQ or configuration document would suffice. On a good note, Barracuda says a thick PDF configuration document is on its way.

The second deficiency is that the Spam Firewall has only one summary report that’s sent by e-mail to the administrator. It would be nice to see increased reporting functionality with five to 10 canned reports, with the data sorted more ways and with differing levels of detail.

Third, vendor support was spotty early on but appears to be getting stronger. Early e-mails and calls to tech support, even in the worst weeks, were returned the same day, but in the past few months, phone calls and e-mails have been answered or returned promptly, so I assume the early poor performance was due to the growing pains of an up-and-coming company.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall comes in a few different versions — models 200, 300, and 400 — depending on how much processing power and storage space you need. For example, the Spam Firewall 300 supports as many as 2,000 active users and 4 million messages per day. Prices range from $1,199 for the 200 model to $3,999 for the top-end 400 model; these prices are cheap when compared with equivalent spam solutions.