I sent a network admin an email last week with some links in the body. One of the links was to Sunbelt Software. The admin never got it because their Barracuda Spam Firewall blocked it. Why? Because it had a link to Sunbelt’s website in the body:
I have heard of anti-spam solutions blocking references to competitors, but I never had experienced it. There is probably a reasonable explanation. Barracuda is probably trying to block discount software spam or something. My friend didn’t send me the “Bayesian Breakdown” that Barracuda offers so I’m not sure.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Alex Eckelberry // Oct 17, 2007 at 5:45 am
Nope, it’s true. Barracuda blocks emails if the word “Sunbelt Software” are in the text. We’ve asked them about it, but they have feigned ignorance.
Since we’re rather fierce competitors, one can only hope that this isn’t a tactic on their part to block potentially competitive offerings.
Alex Eckelberry CEO, Sunbelt Software
2 Network Enforcer // Nov 29, 2007 at 11:44 pm
That is truly sad if commercial software has to actually block its’ competitors like this. That would be like NAV detecting any download of other antivirus software as a virus. It’s just unethical!
3 ColonelGizmo // Jul 20, 2008 at 8:57 am
Barracuda networks suck for reasons beyond this… My network had an infected system that became part of a spam bot. Yes, my systems were all set to update VA sigs like 4x a day and run Microshaft patches every night, I think this was an end user (who had to have Admin privilege) explicitly installing / allowing or trusting something that caused the problem. Anyway, I discovered the infection that morning and physically disconnected the machine. By that afternoon, my IP was delisted from all the blacklists I could find. It actually only landed on about 4. So for the next week, yes I said the next week, there were two kinds of email rejections users were asking me about. Items sent that morning that were tagged by a blacklist (easy answer, just resend) and items rejected by Barracuda networks due to our IP’s ‘poor’ rating. I filled out Barracuda’s net based form three times over the next six days and one of my admins also filled out the form once, for a total of 4 requests. The form even says it will change your reputation to ‘normal’ for 48 hours, but it never changed. The end result - Barracuda will continue to block legitimate emails that you want, or that your clients want for long after the problem is solved. I suspect they do this on purpose, because they get to inflate their ’spam’ blocked count this way. Blacklists are much more accurate, and much more cost effective.
4 T3Knizion // Aug 19, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I should have read this prior to purchasing one…. Seems like they have some issues with support.
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