72 Hours of Barracuda

Before I left the office for the weekend, I installed a Barracuda Spam Firewall on the network. We’ve had nagging, random upticks in the amount of spam that was making it past the Antigen software running on our Exchange Server – even with filter updates multiple times a day. The Outlook filters were catching a lot of the additional UCE that was delivered to users, but it’s not an ideal solution. For those of us who have mobile devices, that spam was getting delivered to those devices regardless of how the desktop client handled it later.

I just checked on how the Barracuda was doing and it had blocked over 11,000 messages since Friday evening. Antigen didn’t have the most exciting reporting features without exporting things to a spreadsheet and playing around with pivot tables, so I can’t say for sure how it compares, but I was impressed. I’ll have to export some of the logs from Antigen at some point and make an official comparison.

It also allowed nearly 300 messages through, many of which were bulk mail that was tagged as such. So I’ll have to tweek that a bit tomorrow. It was just nice to have a weekend where I didn’t get spam passed through to my BlackBerry.

Hopefully people in the office will be impressed as well. I’ll let this run for another week or so and then look into turning on the end-user quarantines.