Barracuda Spam Firewall
Users Guide

Copyright 2005, Barracuda Networks
www.barracudanetworks.com v3.2.22 All rights reserved.

Use of this product and this manual is subject to license. Information in
this document is subject to change without notice.Trademarks Barracuda Spam
Firewall is a trademark of Barracuda Networks. All other brand and product
names mentioned inthis document are registered trademarks or trademarks
of their respective holders. Edited for use by Oxford Networks.

Managing your Quarantine Inbox
Receiving Messages from the Barracuda Spam Firewall
Quarantine Summary Report

The Barracuda Spam Firewall sends you a daily quarantine summary report so you can view the quarantined messages you did not receive. From the quarantine summary report you can also add messages to your whitelist, delete messages, and have messages delivered to your inbox.

The following figure shows an example of a quarantine summary report.

 

Using the Quarantine Interface

At the end of every quarantine summary report is a link to the quarantine interface where you can setadditional preferences and classify messages as spam and not spam.

Logging into the Quarantine Interface

To log into your quarantine interface:
1. Click the link provided at the bottom of the Quarantine Summary Report (displayed above), or go to www.megalink.net and click on the ANTI-SPAM link.
Result: The login page appears.

2. Enter your email address and password, and click Login.

Your login information resides in the greeting message sent to you from the Barracuda Spam Firewall.

Your login information resides in the greeting message sent to you from the Barracuda Spam Firewall. Click to access your quarantine interface to set preferences and classify messages Select to deliver, whitelist or delete quarantined messages

Managing your Quarantine Inbox

After logging into the quarantine interface, select the QUARANTINE INBOX tab to view a list of your
quarantined messages. When you first start using the quarantine interface, you should view this list on a
daily basis and classify as many messages as you can.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall has a learning engine that learns how to deal with future messages based
on the ones you classify as spam and not spam. The learning engine becomes more effective over time
as you teach the system how to classify messages and as you set up rules based on your whitelist and
blacklist.

Clicking on an email displays the message.

The following describes the actions you can perform from this page.

Deliver - Delivers the selected message to your standard email inbox.
Note: If you want to classify a message or add it to your whitelist, make sure to do so
before delivering the message to your inbox. Once the Barracuda Spam Firewall
delivers a message, it is removed from your quarantine list.

Whitelist- Adds the selected message to your whitelist so all future emails from this sender are
not quarantined unless the message contains a virus or banned attachment type.
The Barracuda Spam Firewall adds the sending email address exactly as it appears
in the message to your personal whitelist.

Note that some commercial mailings may come from one of several servers such as
mail3.abcbank.com, and a subsequent message may come from mail2.abcbank.com.
See the section on managing your whitelists and blacklists for tips on specifying
whitelists with greater effectiveness.

Delete- Deletes the selected message from your quarantine list. The main reason to delete
messages is to help you keep track of which quarantine messages you have
reviewed.

You cannot recover messages you have deleted.

Classify as Not Spam - Classifies the selected message as not spam.
Note: Some bulk commercial email may be considered useful by some users and
spam by others. Instead of classifying bulk commercial email, it may be more
effective to add it to your whitelist (if you wish to receive such messages) or blacklist
(if you prefer not to receive them).

Classify as Spam- Classifies the selected message as spam.
Changing your User Preferences
After logging into your quarantine interface, you can use the PREFERENCES tab to change your
account password, modify your quarantine and spam settings, and manage your whitelist and blacklist.
Changing Your Quarantine Settings

The following table describes the quarantine settings you can change from the
PREFERENCES-->Quarantine Settings page.

Quarantine Setting Description

Enable Quarantine - chooses whether the Barracuda Spam Firewall quarantines your messages.
If you select Yes, the Barracuda Spam Firewall does not deliver
quarantined messages to your general email inbox, but you can view these
messages from the quarantine interface and quarantine summary reports.
If you select No, all messages that would have been quarantined for you
are delivered to your general email inbox.

Notification Interval - The frequency the Barracuda Spam Firewall sends you quarantine
summary reports. The default is daily. The Barracuda Spam Firewall only
sends quarantine summary reports when one or more of your emails have
been quarantined.

If you select Never, you can still view your quarantined messages from the
quarantine interface, but you will not receive quarantine summary reports.

Notification Address - The email address the Barracuda Spam Firewall should use to deliver your
quarantine summary report.

Default Language - The language in which you want to receive your quarantine notifications.
This setting also sets the default encoding for handling unknown character
sets during filtering. All email notifications from the Barracuda Spam
Firewall are in UTF8 encoding.

Enabling and Disabling Spam Scanning of your Email

If you do not want the Barracuda Spam Firewall scanning your emails for spam content, you can disable
spam filtering from the PREFERENCES-->Spam Settings page. From this page you can also change the
default spam scoring levels that determine when your emails are tagged, quarantined or blocked.
When the Barracuda Spam Firewall receives an email for you, it scores the message for its spam
probability. This score ranges from 0 (definitely not spam) to 10 or higher (definitely spam). Based on
this score, the Barracuda Spam Firewall either allows, quarantines, or blocks the message. A setting of 10 for any setting disables that option.

The following table describes the fields on the PREFERENCES-->Spam Settings page.

Spam Filter -- Enable/Disable

Enable Spam Filtering

Select Yes for the Barracuda Spam Firewall to scan your emails for spam.

Select No to have all your messages delivered to you without being scanned
for spam.

 

Spam Scoring

Use System Defaults:
Select Yes to use the default scoring levels. To configure the scoring levels
yourself, select No and make the desired changes in the Spam Scoring Levels
section described below.

Tag score - Messages with a score above this threshold, but below the quarantine
threshold, are delivered to you with the word [SPAM] added to the subject line.
Any message with a score below this setting is automatically allowed. The
default value is 3.5.

Quarantine score - Messages with a score above this threshold, but below the block threshold, are
forwarded to your quarantine mailbox.
If you set your quarantine to 1, it will quarantine almost everything. If you set the score to 10, it will
not quarantine anything.

To enable the quarantine feature, this setting must have a value lower than the
block threshold.

Block score - Messages with a score above this threshold are not delivered to your inbox.
If you do not wish to have any mail blocked, you should set the score to 10 to disable blocking.
Adding Email Addresses and Domains to Your Whitelist and Blacklist The PREFERENCES-->Whitelist/Blacklist
page lets you specify email addresses and domains from which you do or do not want to receive emails.

To whitelist or blacklist senders, follow these steps:
1. Go to the PREFERENCES-->Whitelist/Blacklist page.
A list of your existing whitelisted and blacklisted addresses appears on this page.
2. To delete a whitelist or a blacklist entry, click the trash can icon next to the address.
3. To add an entry, type an email address into the appropriate field, and click the corresponding Add button.

Tips on specifying addresses
When adding addresses to your whitelist and blacklist, note the following tips:
If you enter a full email address, such as johndoe@yahoo.com, just that user is specified. If you
enter just a domain, such as yahoo.com, all users in that domain are specified.
If you enter a domain such as barracudanetworks.com, all subdomains are also included, such as
support.barracudanetworks.com and test.barracudanetworks.com.

Mass mailings often come from domains that do not resemble the company’s Web site name. For
example, you may want to receive mailings from historybookclub.com, but you will find that this
site sends out its mailing from the domain hbcfyi.com. Examine the From: address of an actual
mailing that you are trying to whitelist or blacklist to determine what to enter.

Whitelist - The list of email addresses or domains from which you always wish to receive
messages. The only time the Barracuda Spam Firewall blocks a message from
someone on your whitelist is when the message contains a virus or a disallowed
attachment file extension.

Blacklist - The list of senders from whom you never want to receive messages. The Barracuda
Spam Firewall immediately discards messages from senders on your blacklist. These messages are not tagged or quarantined and cannot be recovered. The sender does not receive a notice that the message was deleted, and neither do you. The only time a blacklisted email address is delivered is if the same email address also appears in your whitelist.
There are two tabs in the upper part. "Quarantine Inbox" and "Preferences". Use the Quarantine Inbox to review email in detention.

At this point, you can either select individual emails using the check boxes located to the left of each email, and then proceed to click on one of the buttons above indicating Deliver, Whitelist or Delete in order to perform that action to the group of emails you have check marked, or you can individually click on the links on the right side, below the "Actions" column, reading "Deliver", "Whitelist", and "Delete".

Deliver will release the selected email(s) from quarantine and allow the email to be delivered to your inbox immediately.
Whitelist will add the sender's email address to a list of emails from people you would like to be delivered regardless of content. Thus, any email on your whitelist will be delivered to your email box, no questions asked. You may view what addresses are in your whitelist and add / delete this list by going to the "Preferences" tab and selecting "Whitelist".

Delete will permanently delete the selected email(s) and report this email, as SPAM, to aid in the Barracuda system learning what suspicious emails are truly spam.

Q: What are the different menus, inside the "Preferences" tab, used for?

A: The Barracuda unit is a very versatile server, and it allows the each end user to configure some of the settings in a per-user basis. This is done because people tend to have different preferences as to what kind of email they wish or not to receive, and while there is a global setting for some pure, beyond doubt, obvious SPAM, there are other types of emails, which may or may not be considered SPAM depending who you ask. The Barracuda designers understood this, and provided the end user with a degree of control over his/her own emails. This is where the Preferences tab comes in handy.

It has the following options, which can be selected by clicking on them:

Quarantine Enable / Disable:

Spam Filter Enable / Disable:

Spam Scoring:

Whitelist / Blacklist:

Quarantine Notification:

Quarantine Notification Email:

If you have mail in your Quarantine, you will recieve an email showing you what messages are being held. Please note that you can click on the link in the email to load the Quarantine page. Below are the options the email gives you.
Deliver will release the selected email(s) from quarantine and allow the email to be delivered to your inbox immediately.
Whitelist will add the sender's email address to a list of emails from people you would like to be delivered regardless of content. Thus, any email on your whitelist will be delivered to your email box, no questions asked. You may view what addresses are in your whitelist and add / delete this list by going to the "Preferences" tab and selecting "Whitelist".Delete will permanently delete the selected email(s) and report this email, as SPAM, to aid in the Barracuda system learning what suspicious emails are truly spam.