Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall

Mon May 17 19:32:29 UTC 2004

On May 17, 2004, at 2:35 PM, Claydon, Tom wrote:

>
> Doing evaluations on anti-spam, anti-virus solutions, and ran across
> this:
>
> http://www.barracudanetworks.com/
>
> Looks like a good box -- even won an Editor's Choice award from Network
> Computing recently.
>
> Does anyone on list have any experience with these boxes? If so, how 
> are
> they with false positives, quarantine capabilities, etc?
>

Tom,

  I have a Barracuda Spam Firewall 400,  We handle about 9k users and 
the thing is AMAZING!

My old setup was 4 dual-PIII 550Mhz, 1 GIg RAM running 
Qmail/Qmail-ldap/spamassasin/F-Secure AV.   My inbox would get 300+ 
spams/day, many of them not tagged at all
This setup would melt  on a regular basis when spam floods would come in

My current setup is a Barracuda 400 and 1 inbound mail server (dual 
P-III 550Mhz...).  My inbox now gets 5 untagged spams/day and about 10 
quarantined.
This setup has been able to handle everything thrown at it so far with 
no  noticeable performance hit

My customers love it,  I love it,  best  thing I have purchased in the 
last 12 months.  Very low false positives and high hit rate.  The 
quarantine box is very easy to handle for users,  they will get an 
e-mail once per day with a list of messages and links to whitelist, 
deliver or delete.  When they click on a  link they will connect/log 
into the Barracuda.  They can manage their own Bayesian filters from 
the quarantine interface.

It really has had a dramatic effect on my spam,  I'm wondering what 
I'll be doing with all my spare time now that I don't have to manage my 
mail server.

I was watching the message log one day and noticed a spam flood in 
action.

10 messages came in and went to customers tagged about 0.5 or so
10 messages came in and went to customers tagged as ::SPAM:: with a 
score of 3.7 or so
10 messages came in and went to quarantine with a score of 5.5 or so
a bazillion messages were blocked with a score > 20

It learned very fast.

My Barracuda is currently blocking 500k+ messages/day

current stats  (installed 13 days)

Blocked (SPAM) :7453215
Blocked (Virus)  : 24600
Quarantined       : 82170
Tagged                : 31552
Allowed               : 580876

Average Queue latency :  4 seconds
Unique Recipients : 8245

I just signed up as a reseller and I'm building a managed mail solution 
around it.

If you are an ISP I recommend you get a 400 series or higher.  You can 
customize the web interface a bit and it handles multiple domains 
better (per domain spam settings)

-Matt