Thoughts on Barracudas?

[Dave Strydom]

> "I've tried Mailscanner on FreeBSD for almost one year. It worked great
> for about two months, then after every upgrade it began to let more and
> more spam through. I've tried everything to fix it and just got tired of
> my users complaining of increased spam.

Someone please explain to me how upgrading MailScanner can possible
allow more spam through?
Thats like saying "I upgraded my car doors, now my tyres have lost
grip on the road"


> What is your opinion on the Barracuda appliance?

I think they have a good marketing department, lets take their 800
Model for example:

# 15 million email messages per day
# 8,000-22,000 active email users
# 5,000 Domains
# 200GB Quarantine Storage

5000 Domains? ok, this unit is already useless to me.
Lets say you max this thing out and do 15 million emails a day, and
say 10% of those emails are spam and have an total average size of
100kb.
you would use up 143GB of that 200GB Quarantine.

I just think they have a good marketing department.


> How easy is it to use?
depends on how stupid the person is that is using it?


> Does it actually work?
I would imagine so, yes, how well i dont know.

> Can it survive the loads they say it can?
Don't know, i dont know anyone who does 15 million emails a day,
or anyone who has the bandwidth to handle this, it works out to 173
emails a second.

> And, of course, how does it compare with MailScanner?
I think it depends on what your requirements are, if you have a small
business network and you dont want to spend time maintaining servers,
then go with the fishy spam solution.

In our enviroment it would not suite us at all, MailScanner is the
best solution i know of to spam filtering. I use MailScanner with
Mailwatch and exim (using EximConfig
http://www.jcdigita.com/eximconfig/ ). And i hardly have any spam come
through our systems (5 MailScanner Servers).


Dave