With nearly 400 million victims of cybercrime coming forward every year, it’s no wonder that there are so many different email security filters on the market today. Each claims to have a unique approach to email security, but finding the right fit for your own organization can be challenging.
Over the last several years, many organizations have opted for Barracuda, a popular email security provider. However, there are both negatives and positives associated with their approach. Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of the Barracuda Spam Filter:
1. Pro: “Pre-filtering” for spam and viruses.
Not only does the Barracuda Spam Filter protect from common spam and viruses, it also includes uses a cloud-based service that pre-filters messages before they even arrive to the system’s firewall.
2. Con: Low spam-catching success.
Unfortunately, it takes a while for the Barracuda Spam Filter to “learn” what is truly spam and what is legitimate email, leaving your organization vulnerable. Multiple industry publications, including PC Magazine, have found that the Barracuda Spam Filter scores low on spam-catching tests. This may be due in part to the fact that it doesn’t use content filtering.
3. Con: Quarantined email.
In addition, instead of blocking suspicious emails entirely, Barracuda sends them to a quarantine folder. Individual users can access quarantined email, which opens them up to the possibility of accidentally clicking on spam or downloading a virus. It would be safer to employ a type of Sender Address Verification to identify legitimate senders, while blocking malicious messages completely.
4. Pro: Outbound email filtering.
Barracuda uses a subset of its spam defense layers to detect any outbound spam and viruses that may have infiltrated your organization through botnet spam.
5. Con: No simultaneous inbound and outbound filtering.
Unfortunately, Barracuda’s Spam Firewall box processes either inbound or outbound email—but not both. That leaves your organization vulnerable. In addition, outbound email is also left open to spoofing schemes, since Barracuda doesn’t offer domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance (DMARC), a leading technique that guards against spoofing schemes. DMARC is an open email standard that works with SPF and DKIM to protect a company’s email channel at the domain level. With DMARC, recipients of email from your organization can rest assured that messages are legitimate.
6. Pro: Email tagging.
The Barracuda Spam Filter is designed to streamline a user’s inbox by using tags, such as ‘bulk’, to distinguish different types of messages.
7. Con: Little focus on improving email efficiency.
While it is helpful to label different types of messages, it can still be very distracting to have a stream of bulk emails filling your inbox all day. Other spam filters offer more of a focus on email efficiency, rather than email security alone, by diverting bulk emails away from the user’s inbox so that he or she can access them but experiences less distraction throughout the day. This can lead to a 90-percent reduction in emails received—a huge win for company-wide productivity.
If your company has been leveraging the Barracuda Spam Filter, you could benefit from a higher level of security and email efficiency. To meet today’s email security challenges, Sendio developed Email Security Gateway™ and Opt-Inbox™ to protect your enterprise from email security risks and enable faster, easier email management every day.
