BarricadeMX: The ultimate spam-fighting app, server-side

Hi,

I have tried FSL's BarricadeMX software at two of my client's site. This piece of software is a giant step in the battle against spam.

What is it?

It is an SMTP proxy, which does many, many tests during the SMTP transaction in a very efficient way. If one test fails, it rejects the message with a 5xx SMTP reply, so the sender should be notified. Il also implements Greylisting in a more intelligent manner than most current Greylisting implementations.

I installed and configured it for 2 clients which are in a different situation: One is a high-volume, multiple servers setup, and the other is a smaller setup with only 1 scanning server.

On the big setup, it allowed this client to stop the delays they were experiencing and the spam-catching rate is a lot higher. It also simplfied management.

On the smaller setup, I enabled BarricadeMX's clamd and spamd support. This way, viruses are blocked at the MTA level, and any spam that scores over a defined parameter. In this case, I chose to block anything that gets a spamassassin score over 15.
It is a lot easier to manage than the previous setup (FSL has a yum repository, so updating is very simple). I also got rid of the quarantine, and now every false positive gets notified.

I strongly recommend BarricadeMX to anyone who has a Unix/Linux server on hand. It will eventually even run on Microsoft Exchange!

You can try BarricadeMX for 30 days for free. I suggest you ask for the pricelist at the same time, because once you've tried it, you won't be able to let it go!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

General linux performance troubleshooting

Here's a list of commands that you should execute and then share the output to someone who can help you figure out what resource is the bottleneck in your system. Note, it requires the  sysstat  and  procps  packages (ubuntu and RHEL and its derivatives): uptime vmstat 1 10 iostat -xN 2 10 mpstat -P ALL 3 10 pidstat 1 10 free -mw (or free -m, if your OS doesn't support -w)  uptime is to see the load averages on the system. vmstat is mostly used to tell if the system is swapping or not. If you see significant numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns, your system is most likely swapping (using the hard drive as RAM), which usually slows performance a lot. iostat is mostly used to determine if your disk subsystem is not able to cope with the load. If you see one or more lines that shows 100 or close almost constantly, it is probably the case.  If it is your swap volume, you probably saw numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns in the  vmsta...
Read more

Networker automated recovery testing using the REST API - introduction

One feature that is lacking from Networker, compared to some of its competitors, is the built-in automatic recovery testing. However, when there's an API, there is a way.  Networker's REST API is not perfect, but it allows the backup administrator to perform queries about Networker resources (objects). As my workload is going up, I realize that one of the tasks that I tend to skip the most is the periodical recovery tests.  Don't forget that a a backup that is not tested should be considered non-successful. I also found out that my recovery tests were not diverse enough. When I started this project, I knew a little bit about REST APIs, and nothing about JSON processing. With the Networker REST API documentation, and the help of a friend and Networker Support staff, I was able to create HTTP queries with Postman,  cURL and jq . Once I got the queries that I needed, I put them in a bash script that would somehow select one backup, and then restore it. My first attem...
Read more

Tips for being a better system administrator

Here are a few tips that I have discovered or implemented during my career, that can help anyone get better results: Follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy  or better 3 copies of the data 3 different media 1 copy offsite Test your backups regularly. Ideally, automate your recovery tests. Use Whatever-as-code as much as you can. IaC is the first that comes to my mind, but using code to define objects and their properties have several advantages: Auto-documentation of changes Ability to easily rollback (using source code management like Git) Makes it easier for standardization an compliance Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, Terraform, Pulumi are good examples Maintain a changelog of all the major changes in your infrastructure (that isn't already "documented" because you're using IaC). Keep track of your hardware inventory and plan your renewals and warranty extension purchases. Build a spreadsheet with all the components that you manage and make sure that everyone on the sysadmi...
Read more