Barracuda Networks is at it again: Any Suggestions as to an Alternative?

Mon Apr 11 11:55:51 UTC 2011

On Mon, 11 Apr 2011, Ray Corbin wrote:

> <rant>I 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 abuse at 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.

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  Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
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