Re: Barracuda Spam Filter

[Charlie Prothero <Charlie.Prothero () KEYSTONE EDU>]

Jamie,

Points well taken.  On #6, we are going to remove our mercury server
from DNS.  I left it there for the duration of our "free trial" of the
service, but Tangent does, indeed, recommend removing MX records for
your servers after implementing the service.

Thanks,
Charlie. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jamie A. Stapleton [mailto:jstapleton () COMPUTER-BUSINESS COM] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2005 10:19 AM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Barracuda Spam Filter

Reasons to consider actually having the box on your site:

1.  Control.  The Barracuda only allows for a single administrator.  For
it to function at 100%, you would want your own box for your
organization so that you could control all of the settings.  The spam
that St. Augustine's gets could be much different than the spam that
Keystone gets.  If you are both operating off of a hosted box, the
settings can only be tweaked to the best common setting.

2.  Security.  Do you really want an outsourced provider to have a copy
of all of your inbound messages?

3.  Cost.  These people are charging $1000/year at a minimum.  You can
buy a solution for a very little bit more.

4.  Reliability.  Ms4.tcnoc.com and ms5.tcnoc.com both resolve to the
same IP address (63.209.10.244).  This means there is no geographic
diversity in this solution.

5.  Reliability.  Will users in NC really understand their mail being
broken if there is a power outage in California?

6.  Knowledge.  These people don't appear to know what they are doing.
They left mercury.keystone.edu (with IP address 65.209.95.165) as an MX
record.  Any spammer can find this and attack it without effort.  (See
below.)

220 mercury.keystone.edu Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version:
5.0.2195.6713 ready at  Tue, 26 Jul 2005 09:24:36 -0400

If you have any questions, feel free to call me.

Jamie
804.412.1601

-----Original Message-----
From: Gibbs, Aaron M. [mailto:AMGibbs () ST-AUG EDU] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2005 9:06 AM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Barracuda Spam Filter

Charlie
I've looked at the Tangent option and since we're a small college also
think it might work well. What have been your experiences? Do you or
anyone on the list serve no how it compares to actually having the
device onsite?

Aaron M Gibbs
Interim Vice President/CIO
Center for Information Technology
St. Augustine's College
919-516-4379 (Office)
919-516-4382 (Fax)
amgibbs () st-aug edu
www.st-aug.edu



-----Original Message-----
From: Charlie Prothero [mailto:Charlie.Prothero () KEYSTONE EDU]
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 8:38 PM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Barracuda Spam Filter


Aaron,

Keystone College is using a Barracuda, but we don't own it or have it on
our premises.  Our MX records are routed to Tangent Computer
(http://www.tcnoc.com/) where they scan all of our incoming mail and
forward the cleansed remainder to our Exchange server.  We're relatively
small, so this service is more cost effective than operating our own
Barracuda appliance.  They offer a free trial, and were very pleasant to
deal with.  If anyone is interested, our sales rep was Louise
O'Sullivan, and her number is 800 342 9388 X2137.

- Charlie.

Charlie Prothero
IT Director
Keystone College

-----Original Message-----
From: Gibbs, Aaron M. [mailto:AMGibbs () ST-AUG EDU]
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 11:35 AM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: [SECURITY] Barracuda Spam Filter

I'm looking at the Barracuda Spam Filter and would like to know if
anyone is currently using it. If so what your experiences have been. 

Aaron M Gibbs
Interim Vice President/CIO
Center for Information Technology
St. Augustine's College
919-516-4379 (Office)
919-516-4382 (Fax)
amgibbs () st-aug edu
www.st-aug.edu