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SECURITY
Spam Firewall's Bayesian filtering, solid management nets unwanted e-mail
I'VE REVIEWED MANY security products, but it's rare for me to be so impressed with a product that I want to keep and use it after the review. Barracuda Networks' Spam Firewall is my favorite keeper so far this year.
In my experience, perimeter solutions usually rank just behind Internet-hosted service offerings in accuracy, with end-point solutions having the worst rates. This is not the case with Barracuda - it's among the more accurate anti-spam products I've tested, even when compared with seemingly more intelligent hosted solutions. In a crowded field, Barracuda Spam Firewall stands out for being packed with features, easy to use, accurate, and relatively low-cost.
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The Spam Firewall 300 is a 1U appliance running Linux on an AMD Athlon XP 1900+ processor with a 40GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM. It is designed to be placed as a front-end MTA in front of SMTP servers, but unlike most Linux appliances, the Spam Firewall rarely if ever requires you to delve into the world of command-line prompts because administration is performed via almost any JavaScript-enabled browser. Although there are more than 100 features that can be enabled or customized, the default settings are fine for most environments.
Installation is fairly easy. Administrators set the correct IP address and then follow a simple four-page document to complete the setup, leaving the advanced options, such as Exchange LDAP interaction, for another configuration session. The defaults are accurate enough to capture most spam, so you can customize and strengthen the settings later when you are more familiar with the system.
If you've read about an anti-spam feature, the Spam Firewall 300 probably has it. Functionality includes keyword blocking, whitelists, internal and external black-lists, Bayesian filtering, subject and header filtering, and reverse DNS lookups, as...