What's a good alternative to the Barracuda Spam Appliance?

Question

Searching for Barracuda alternatives didn't yield much. Can anyone recommend a good spam appliance like Barracuda?

I want something that will strip bad stuff out like if I have a .txt attachment that is really an .exe. It sends the email but strips out the attachment. I didn't think Barracuda did that.

Update: It should be a commercial product (but thanks for other suggestions for open source.)

Update: Must work with Windows and Exchange.

If you're dead set on giving away money, you can give me some money and I'll sell you some OSS that'll do the trick. — womble, Jul 27 '11 at 22:40
Shopping Questions and product recommendations are Off-Topic on any of the [se] sites. See [Q and A is hard, lets go Shopping](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping) and the [FAQ] for more details. — Mark Henderson, Mar 26 '13 at 01:12

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 27 '11 at 23:35

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Have you looked at Postini(google bought it) as hosted spam prevention?

answered Jul 27 '11 at 23:35

Raj J

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+1 spam appliance = wasting your own bandwidth, power, and cooling to block spam on-site. – gravyface Jul 28 '11 at 00:21
You will get back a lot of bandwidth by killing the spam before it hits your link. The cost is excellent and you can allow users to manage/retrieve their blocked mail – uSlackr Jul 28 '11 at 00:39
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We use Postini and basically hate it. We're switching to an in-house solution. YMMV. – Chris S Jul 28 '11 at 00:39
@Chris what are you switching to? – johnny Jul 28 '11 at 18:23
@Johnny Switching to Microsoft Forefront 2010 for Exchange; haven't used it enough to have an informed opinion yet. – Chris S Jul 28 '11 at 18:52
@chris does that reside on the edge server itself or do you have a separate box that has forefront on it? – johnny Jul 28 '11 at 18:53
@Johnny it's on the Edge server. It also has the option to run on a separate server, but it didn't make sense for our setup. – Chris S Jul 28 '11 at 18:56
We tried Postini and after a year of terrible service, gave up and moved to another spam blocking service. Tech support is non-existent and to this day I cannot log into the domain billing system to cancel the account. After 5 failed attempts to bill us we canceled the CC we used and got a new one. – Greg Merideth Jul 31 '11 at 22:41

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 27 '11 at 22:08

If I was trying to build a high speed large scale filter for email to remove spam and viruses with Open Source software I would look at:

DSpam + ClamAV

They can be configured to work together pretty simply and DSpam has a nice Web Interface for managing everything.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 27 '11 at 23:18

Our office uses the spam blocking feature from WatchGuard firewalls, this way we don't need another device on the network. You could also look to external services that block email before hitting your network like Securence or Postini (albeit Postini support is non-existent).

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 28 '11 at 00:17

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'Should be commercial'? Don't look at the Open Source MailScanner system then http://www.mailscanner.info/, have a look at its commercial cousin instead: http://www.fsl.com/

answered Jul 28 '11 at 00:17

Linker3000

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Yes. Should be someone we pay...commercial. Plus this one is Linux only...Windows is coming they say. I didn't specify that though. Thanks. – johnny Jul 28 '11 at 18:23

score 0 · Answer 5 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:13

There are several questions here on Server Fault that address Barracuda alternatives.

See: Barracuda spam filter alternative - virtualization/appliance friendly?
And: Open Source or lower-cost alternatives to Barracuda Spam Filter

But I'm also entertaining the idea of using a used Barracuda. I've sold and deployed plenty of new spam units, but the license policy is a bit ridiculous (non-transferrable, very unfriendly). Plus, costs have gone way up. There are plenty of used units on eBay, and I think the only downside is not being able to get appliance firmware updates and virus definitions. I believe the Barracuda Central is a standard RBL, and the Bayesian database functionality is still there, so perhaps that could work for you.

What's a good alternative to the Barracuda Spam Appliance?

5 Answers5