Re: anti-spam software

[Bob Bayn <Bob.Bayn () USU EDU>]

We used Barracuda appliances for several years and were quite
satisfied until we hit some functional limit and they were
overwhelmed.  We had 3 inbound Barracuda 400s in a cluster
(and 2 more for outbound mail relay service).  As we approached
a million messages a day they would fairly abruptly start doing
what I would call "thrashing" (our old burroughs 6500 would do
that decades ago) and couldn't push anything through.  We added
our two outbounds to the inbound cluster in a not very successful
attempt to cope with the buildup of messages.

That opened the financial floodgates and allowed us to get a
pair of Ironport appliances to take over.  Those appliances are
handling in excess of 10 million messages a day now with no
indication of capacity problems, and much less management time
devoted to them.

In defense of the Barracuda folks, I will say that their tech
support were very responsive and helpful with our occasional
earlier problems, many of which were the result of our novice
level of understanding how to manage them.  We were quite
satisfied until the thrashing started.  I don't know what was
the cause of our problem or how it might have been possible to
resolve it without switching to a different system.

--
Bob Bayn  ride-a-bike (435)797-2396
Network Security Team coordinator
Office of Information Techology
Utah State University




> We use Barracuda anti-spam appliances, and they have worked great for
> us.
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Brian Basgen
> Information Security
> Pima Community College


Maria Iano asked:
> > I am hoping to pick your brains about commercial anti-spam solutions.
> >
> > The Math Department has roughly 1000 user accounts and currently uses
> > SpamAssassin, as well as many of the spam filtering options in
> > postfix such as header and body checks and DNS blacklists. Our users
> > mark messages as spam and we feed them to the Bayesian database for
> > SpamAssassin. Nonetheless, a lot of spam still gets through. So we
> > are looking into commercial anti-spam software. Has anyone else gone
> > the route of purchasing a commercial solution? If so, how did it work
> > out for you? Has anyone else compiled a review of the different
> > choices and how they compare? If so, I would love to see it. If you
> > know of any commercial anti-spam providers that offer deep education
> > discounts that would be good to know also.