Barracuda Spam Firewall: first look

I’ve been testing the Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall 300 for the last couple of weeks. So far, I’m very pleased with it; it has done an effective job of filtering spam and virus messages. The best thing is that it incorporates rate control along with other more conventional filtering (including Bayesian and header analysis); this saved me from a huge comment-spam attack last week (see the big blue spike on the “daily mail statistics” graph in the picture below). The unit was very easy to set up and install, and it has worked without interruption since I installed it.

This summary screen shows a big blue spike for earlier in the week– that turned out to be because of a huge comment spam attack that generated more than 2,000 messages. Fortunately, all of those got blocked so I didn’t have to deal with them (although a few did leak through, slowly, after Pair sent them to my secondary MX). The ability to subject-tag suspect messages is valuable, too, since my users can easily filter them. I don’t have cost information, but my guess is that the unit I have is probably price-competitive with high-end software solutions like MailMarshal and PolicyPatrol. I’ll write a more detailed analysis of the Spam Firewall after I’ve had a chance to work with it more, but for now– It Just Works.