Our bad experience with Barracuda Networks
Dear Customers,
I bought a Barracuda Model 400 last October. Our current setup is as follows:
Barracuda GW —> Internal servers —> Spamassassin server —> Quarantine or local delivery.
Although there was a small percentage of spam being caught by adding the Barracuda, this was because I added my own Regex rules on the Barracuda. Without my Regex rules, using their “intent” RBL, a trained bayes, and SBL-XBL RBL, the device gave me nothing in terms of more spam captured than Spamassassin with SARE. In fact, I don’t have concrete numbers but I am willing to put $100 and say SA/SARE does better.
Because I am a customer, I have access to the Barracuda Networks forums. I am not the only one unimpressed and since it’s a moderated forum, all the postings I have made which have a negative undertones, do not get posted.
OK, enough of that. I bought the server in October (8 months ago) for about $4800. This included a years license. Well, the server has a bad drive based on their support’s diagnostics. They want me to pay $899 to have it replaced! FWIW, if you open the box yourself, it voids support.
I want to say that if your thinking of buying one of the Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall
(www.barracudanetworks.com), save your money!. I would have been better off spending about $2000 for two decent servers and running SA/SARE at the perimeter.
I hope this helps somebody else from making the same mistake.
Brian
September 20th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
I have setup the Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall at several clients.
The one that I prefer to use is SpamGate Anti-Spam Appliance.
It was all the features of the Barracuda, at a less expensive price, less restrictive on licenses, easy to setup, and it works great.
Basic information from them: (www.spamgatetech.com)
SpamGate Anti-spam Appliance: provides protection to your email server and you. Anti- Spam, Anti-Viruses, Phishing Blocker, Fraud Protection, and Email Attachment Guard all in one easy to maintain, cost effective Appliance. SpamGate has anti-spam solutions for small SOHO, medium size businesses, large enterprises and education / school districts. The SpamGate anti spam appliance quickly eliminates spam from enterprise email systems. Most anti-spam appliances require time-consuming and management-intensive rules, blacklists or signatures to work. But SpamGate intercepts spam and other unwanted threats at the gateway level, filtering out questionable email before it impacts the email servers. This removes the extra load on your email server, and adds additional safety to your workstations receiving the email.