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  • From: "Jojo Almario" <jalmario AT intrahealth.org>
  • To: "Global Reproductive Health IT Support list" <grhits AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [grhits] Barracuda spam firewall
  • Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:16:22 -0500

I wanted to update everyone on our implementation of the Barracuda 400 spam firewall.

 

Its basic function is great.  The vendor who helped us install it was extremely helpful and still is.  When it is blocking you get few false positives and it blocks tons of spam.  Once it is through with the Bayesian learning, it can be set to throttle more.  Here are some issues we ran into.  For every one within the US who has RPC/HTTPS access to our exchange server it works fine.  A lot of users in our organization are in small offices in Eastern, West central, sub Saharan and South Africa.  They are all POP3 users besides the two offices in Rwanda that are connected via VPN and have their own Exchange server connected with ours.

 

The first problem lies in that the POP clients have to use a server for SMTP.  By default the barracuda does not let you relay.  So I left port 25 on a lower priority ip open on my Exchange server for them, and had my main mail record point to the Barracuda.  Pretty soon their was a small amount of email that was not being sent through the Barracuda.  Spammers would scan and see that there was still a port 25 open and send directly to that regardless of the mail priority.  So I allowed relaying for all the POP3 users out there through the Barracuda, but the default settings were so tight that they kept getting time out and rate control blocks and errors.  I increased that level, but I think some users were still getting the errors.  So they were now allowed to relay but couldn’t get but only a few messages to outside organizations. 

 

I talked to Barracuda support, and the tech said that the best thing to do was to add those users to the senders block/accept white list.  I am now in the process of trying that but as with most things, I have to wait till tomorrow early morning to see if it worked.

 

So I don’t want to leave port 25 open to anything except the Barracuda, but it is so stingy on what it will allow, and I don’t know what good settings would be for my .org besides the default settings.  I am tempted to setup a separate SMTP server and point port 25 traffic to it (not from our priority MTA) so POP users in the field have an easy way to relay. 

 

Does any one else have similar experiences?

 

 

JoJo Almario

IT support

Intrahealth International inc.

919-313-9130

jalmario AT intrahealth.org

 



  • [grhits] Barracuda spam firewall, Jojo Almario, 12/20/2006

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