Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall

Martin Hepworth martinh at solid-state-logic.com
Tue May 18 08:13:57 UTC 2004


Matthew

Spamassassin needs quite a bit of tweaking above the out of the box 
setup. I run about 7000 messages a day here, 70% spam, .5% virus (clamav 
and Sophos), very very rarely a FP. I get bove 99% hit rate after adding 
in bayes, serveral additional rules from www.rulesemporium.org and the 
URI checkes. Runs on a 600mhz celeron with load avg < .5


--
Martin Hepworth
Snr Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300


Matthew Crocker wrote:
> 
> 
> 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
> 

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