Barracuda Networks profiles spam

Barracuda Networks is profiling e-mail as it's received by antispam appliances in order to augment spam filtering based on the reputation of a sender. The Mountain View, Calif., antispam appliance maker on Tuesday plans to announce "Predictive Sender Profiling" as its latest technique to combat junk e-mail. Filtering e-mail is more effective by profiling messages and senders on the fly than by just looking up a reputation score in a database that's based on past behavior, said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management at Barracuda.

For example, Barracuda's appliances will follow links in e-mails like a Web browser would and determine the nature of a site before letting the message through, Pao said. Also, if a sender is attempting to send too many messages to nonexistent addresses the e-mail connection will be rejected, he said. The "Predictive Sender Profiling" is available at no extra cost for existing Barracuda Networks customers through a software upgrade.

[thenet411]

Love these things

I have been using Barracuda spam firewalls for over a year and I have never seen anything better.

Does anyone know of anything that beats it?

[rcrusoe]

Same here

Ours are preforming great. The users love having a clean Inbox, and I.T. likes the fact that it is low maintenance.

[DaveNET]

MailFoundry is better...

I evaluated several appliances, but passed on the Barracuda based on several online reviews. The best I have found so far is MailFoundry.

[ckmixx21]

Better than Barracuda - options...

Yes, there are quite a few better solutions than Barracuda. Try getting one for the same price that is fully managed, totally redundant and has no false positives. We regularly change over clients to Red Condor who are tired of tuning their Barracuda filter and sick of losing important emails.

[ralph75les]

re: love these things

I've used the Barracuda spam firewall as well, and while I agree that it's VERY good, the only thing that I've fount that beats it is Postini.

[Mr. Network]

5 Million blocks since December 1st

We bought one of these barracuda spam firewalls as a demo unit. We turned it live after 3 days of testing. Just yesterday we blocked our 5 millionth spam message with less than 10 legitimate emails being blocked by the device.

We provide email service to over 300 domains and out of 5,800,000 processed emails since December, only about 800,000 of them were legitimate. These devices also let our users manage thier own filtering levels. These things are great, we're also looking forward to picking up some of thier new load balancers and also in the next 6 months they are coming out with an email archiver with can either be integrated into thier spam firewalls, or can be used stand-alone.

Lots of great things coming out of these guys.

[hadaso]

How do you know no email was lost?

Do you carefully read every blocked email to verify it's not a false positive? How do you know only 10 of the 5 million messages were not spam?

I have folders full of spam I scanned manually over years, and several times while looking at them I found false positives in there, and that's for manually scanned spam out of only a few thousand messages. I don't see how you can claim that there are only 10 false positives out of 5000000 when this accuracy is not possible for a human brain. I don't see what procedure you have that you can base such a claim on.

[Schratboy]

Predictive my spambot?

Yet another technology solution to stop spam. Every roadblock the OEMs build into their products, even if they're effective out of the box, won't be effective very long. It's the ever-moving nature of threats that rended the best solutions obsolete. So don't spend too much on your security solutions folks!