OK, its been a year since my Barracuda subscription expired. The unit still stops some spam. I figured that I would go and see what they would do if I tried to renew my subscription EXACTLY one year after it expired. Would their renewal website say "Oh, you are at your anniversary date", and renew me for a year?
No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that. Sorry Barracuda - you get no money from me and I'll tell everyone I know about this policy of yours.
I posted an article about this unscrupulous practice on my blog last year at http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46
My question is - does anyone have any suggestions for another e-mail appliance like the Barracuda Spam Firewall that doesn't try to charge their customers for time not used. I should be able to shut off the unit for a year or whatever and simply renew from the point that I re-activate the unit instead of having to pay for back-years that I didn't use.
Thanks
No such luck: They want me to PAY FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR for
which I did NOT receive service and then for the current (upcoming
year). Sorry - I don't allow myself to be ripped off like that.
Hi John, this is actually a pretty common practice for service
subscription models where the software and its components (spam filter
rules in this case) are being continually updated. Essentially the
way Barracuda sees it is that you bought the product and paid for a
service contract for X period of time and they provided software and
filter updates during that period. You chose not to renew, so they
stopped providing updates. Now you want to renew again from today
forward which means you're going to get the same benefits as customers
who kept their contracts current (i.e. all the software upgrades and
updated filters) without contributing to their development. Granted
you didn't get them at the time they came out, but you're going to
benefit NOW from work that was done at that time (the un-paid period)
AND all the future updates that come out during your new renewal
period. Basically, what they're saying is that if you want to get
those benefits, you have to pay for them by renewing from the point
where you lapsed. If a NEW customer signed on right now, they have to
make an initial purchase which contributes both to the original
development and potentially covers their service plan for some period
as well. They're not trying to rip you off, they're just making sure
everyone pays their share for those accrued benefits. You just have
to look at it from the standpoint of whether it is cheaper for you to
renew your service versus the initial purchase cost for a new customer
with new service. Some companies won't let you renew your service at
all if it's been expired for some period and force you to sign up as a
new customer again, so at least they're giving you that option.
Look at it from the provider's point of view and ask yourself how you
would run the business and what you're trying to do will suddenly look
like a potential loophole that could be abused and needs to be
addressed.
-Justin
I don't know quite how high a performance you need. If it's just email spam/viruses you are concerned with, you can run MailScanner for free, see http://www.mailscanner.info. It's been around for 10 years now and used by a lot of big organisations, many of which are listed on the web site. Written by a colleague here at University of Southampton, hence the plug. If you install and run it yourself, there's a good community mail list for support and tips.
If you want a commercial version then Fort Systems (http://www.fsl.com) can do that, and they also have a companion product BarricadeMX that's a pretty decent pre-filter system.
Tim
As do some states with automotive registration. It's a quite normal practice.
-B
Tim Chown (tjc) writes:
I don't know quite how high a performance you need. If it's just email
spam/viruses you are concerned with, you can run MailScanner for free,
see http://www.mailscanner.info. It's been around for 10 years now and
used by a lot of big organisations, many of which are listed on the
web site. Written by a colleague here at University of Southampton,
hence the plug. If you install and run it yourself, there's a good
community mail list for support and tips.
... or just run amavisd. MailScanner used to do Bad Things with the
Postfix queue, but since then I think they have fixed that, but I will
admit to not having any experience with it.
As to amavisd:
amavisd-new
Have been using it on 1 million mails / day with satisfaction
From: "Jeffrey Lyon" <jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net>
[ Charging back rent on your appliance ]
Juniper does this also.
To pick a slightly different milieu, the Zimbra email system does not;
if you let your support contract lapse, you simply aren't entitled to
support while it's inactive.
Or at least, that's how it was while I cared. 
Cheers,
-- jra
It's quite easy to build your own [out of open-source components] that
easily outperforms any appliance on the market. (Which isn't saying
much: none of them are very good, and all of them are way overpriced.
The bar is thus set quite low.) It will not have all the superfluous
bells and whistles that marketing departments are so fond of hyping,
but it will work, it will be cheap, it will be scalable, and it will be
far more secure.
I've discussed this at some length on mailop and am in the process of
reducing it to near-cookbook form. If you're interested, contact me
offlist and I'll outline it for you.
---rsk
Get a linux box or whatever and roll your own. ASSP, DSPAM, Spamassin, or other open source
Tom
John,
My suggestion isn't _QUITE_ an appliance, but it works very well and
I've been exceptionally happy with it. It's a distribution of linux
controlled via a web interface that does far more than just mail
filtering (at which it is both flexible and adept). Take a look at
http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html. The hardware
requirements shouldn't be too insane, and the rules
updates/subscriptions for the various services are all month to month,
and not a bucket of insane.
Andrew
Ok, shameless plug here, but I invite you to check out our product @ www.untangle.com<http://www.untangle.com>. Base product (including anti-spam) is free. If you want support/web filtering/ or better spam rules they are available as premium add-ons.
Marc Runkel
Untangle, Inc.
Director, Technical Operations
(650) 425-3333 direct
(650) 345-3788 fax
At Sunflower, we use Ironports for our mail filtering. Have been really
happy with the product. The reason you explained is a reason we didn't go
with Barracuda.
FreeBSD, Postfix, Amavisd, Spamassassin, Clamav and TLS
I have seen and deployed this combination as a mail relay to exchange both in and out of large organizations 35,000 plus hosting multiple domains as well as small organizations. With a few scripts it is essentially self containing very little maintenance.
Because I don't need any of the cute and fluffy features like a
quarantine spambox, I just use the barracuda rbl along with a few
others.
You get their filtering power for free and don't have to deal with the
hardware, if you don't particularly like it.
http://www.barracudacentral.org/
The best of them is A.S.S.P. and it works wonder I have deployed a couple and I love it
I agree. Simple clean perl proxy. Lots of GUI config. Can use ClamAV and other AV systems. Easy to deploy. Is no brainer to manage.
Comes in single and multithreaded. Your call. I get a lot of email through the single thread version. Handles TLS and more.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/assp/files/
Untangle's free version...isn't worth the bandwidth. The paid version is ok..but it's a resource hog.
A barracuda appliance uses postfix, amavisd-new, spamassassin with fuzzyOCR and clamav. I've built a couple of these boxes for customers. I use their dnsbl as well as spamhaus. It works pretty well, not much gets through.
--Curtis
Tim Chown (tjc) writes:
I don't know quite how high a performance you need. If it's just email
spam/viruses you are concerned with, you can run MailScanner for free,
see http://www.mailscanner.info. It's been around for 10 years now and
used by a lot of big organisations, many of which are listed on the
web site. Written by a colleague here at University of Southampton,
hence the plug. If you install and run it yourself, there's a good
community mail list for support and tips.
... or just run amavisd. MailScanner used to do Bad Things with the
Postfix queue, but since then I think they have fixed that, but I will
admit to not having any experience with it.
I have 6 MailScanner servers in production running with Postfix, not had any 'real' issues in the last few years.