We have no idea if barracudas in the wild are likely to devour spam. But we do know that the companyis awfully good at filtering and blocking email spam (which is “devouring” in a sense).
The Barracuda spam filter is one of the most well-known and effective in the email industry. Administrators often use Barracuda for email security and configure this spam filter for G Suite and Outlook inboxes. So, understanding the Barracuda filter is especially important for B2B email communication.
There’s also a major blocklist run by the network, which is known as the Let’s take a closer look at a key player in the world of email marketing, including how the Barracuda spam filter works.
What is Barracuda Networks?
For starters, it has nothing to do with fish. While the snake-like water creature with gnarly teeth and bugged-out eyes is pretty scary to swimmers, Barracuda Networks puts fear in the hearts of cybercriminals and spammers.
The company started as a spam and virus firewall back in 2003. It now offers a variety of other security products and services including data protection, network security, as well as application and cloud security.
At this point, Barracuda has been helping mailbox providers and system admins stop spam for about two decades. For many years now, the company has also been recognized as a leader in email security by companies like Gartner, Forrester, and Europe’s SC Awards.
Is Barracuda a spam filter or a blocklist?
Barracuda Networks offers both a customizable spam filter and a blocklist, the latter of which it introduced in 2008. Its email blocklist is open source and free for the public to use. Unless you’re a known spammer, that is.
The company also offers email security solutions with features that protect against phishing, malware, DoS attacks, outbound email filtering, and more. Barracuda states that it protects around a billion emails every day.
Of course, inbound spam filtering is where Barracuda Networks got its start. The Barracuda spam filter identifies incoming mail from known spammers, catches Cyprus Business Email List spammy links in messages, and even has high-tech ways of finding hidden content that traditional spam filters may miss.
How does the Barracuda spam filter work?
Like Barracuda has a method for giving messages a score that rates their likelihood of being spam. Among other factors, the filter looks for the following:
- Is the sender already on a list of suspicious IP addresses?
- Are there any known viruses or malware in the email?
- Bayesian spam analysis: How does the message compare to a database of other emails that are known spam?
- Spam intention analysis: Does the message appear to try and persuade the recipient to do something a spammer would want?
- Does the email fail any specific rules that the user/admin has set up or customized?
- Spam fingerprinting: Has the email already been marked by another Barracuda installation?
To clarify that last point on spam fingerprinting… When a UAE Cell Number Barracuda Network user identifies an email that’s malicious or spammy, information about the message gets sent to where it can be shared with others who’ve installed the filter.
