29 May 2007 - BarricadeMX for OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux released

SnertSoft is proud to announce its newest product in the fight against spam, BarricadeMX, an SMTP filtering proxy. Developed by SnertSoft in collaboration with Fort Systems Ltd., BarricadeMX combines & enhances many of the most popular SMTP filtering techniques, along with some new ones into a comprehensive all-in-one package that can be installed as the first line of defense in front of any mail transfer agent, such as Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, Qmail, and others on the same server or a separate machine.

Written with speed and portability in mind, binary distributions exist for Centos & Redhat Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, with Debian, Solaris, and even Windows to be made available in the coming months.

Originally intended as a pre-filter for MailScanner, BarricadeMX has proven to be an excellent first line of defense either stand alone or in combination with other mail filtering solutions. All of the test sites have shown substantial increases in accurate spam-detection with decreases in system load and email bandwidth. This has been accomplished without any measurable increase in false positives. Here is some of the feedback we have had from our test sites:

Aston University (10,000 email users)

The University was reliant on a cluster of 4 machines providing mail routing and scanning for the University, running the open source MailScanner application software. As the amount of junk e-mail has grown over the last 18 months, these machines were not only unable to cope under the massive onslaught of spam, but were not able to filter out enough junk e- mail. By late 2006 our customers were complaining in droves about the large number of junk getting through - in some cases over 60 junk messages a day. By using RBL lists, and other methods in MailScanner we were able to cut this down to an average of 7 per user per day, but without constant maintenance on a daily basis we weren’t able to consistently keep this any lower.

As the level of junk e-mail blocked was steadily rising above 100,000 per day, we began investigating alternative solutions. We tried 3 black-box solutions from the industry leading vendors and found that these were no more effective, and required a similar amount of attention as our existing MailScanner solution. It was at this point we began talking to Fort Systems Ltd. Our installation of BarricadeMX was without any issues, and we were surprised that when we were told there "will be virtually no spam", Fort Systems Ltd. were right. Since installation, levels of junk mail have dropped dramatically, with virtually no false positives. Combined with MailScanner we are able to effectively manage small outbreaks of Junk E-mail, with the average customer email account receiving less than 5 junk messages per week. In addition, our server load has dropped dramatically and we have been able to half the number of machines required for our mail hubs. As the volume of junk e-mail continues to rise sharply BarricadeMX is helping us work towards ensuring it doesn’t affect our customers.

Steve Goodman
Senior Server Engineer
Information Systems Aston
Aston University, Birmingham, UK

Subject: Barricade is Awesome!!

Thougth I would just drop you a line about a few users that have called in this morning. They both thought there was something wrong with the spam filter because there was NOTHING in the quarintine for the last couple of days. They said on the 2nd of May they had email but starting on the 3rd they were receiving the error message "No rows retrieved". I explained to them that this was not an error message but a new product called Barricade was installed on the 3rd and was filtering spam correctly and effectively. They were happy that they did not have wade through all the junk but were so unacustomed to not having any email there they were shocked.
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Thanks for your help and installing a great product!!

John Ivaska
General Council of the Assemblies of God
Network Services

a financial institution

The amount of spam that was coming into our network was overloading the two dual processor open source MailScanners that were in place for our company. More than 97% of all incoming mail was successfully marked as spam yet hundreds of spam messages were still getting through. Due to the amount of processing taking place, mail delivery started falling behind and began to impact our business. We quickly reached a breaking point and turned to Fort Systems Ltd. for help. Within hours of installing BarricadeMX on our servers, the mail queues were caught up and the CPU utilization went from 100% to less than 1%. Barricade MX has successfully blocked more than 4,000,000 spam attempts since we installed it. Thanks to BarricadeMX, we are safely and effectively handling the mail on our existing servers, thus saving resources that are better used elsewhere. In addition to having a great product, the support the team from Fort Systems Ltd. has given us has been phenomenal.

Thanks

James

For further information, pricing, or evaluation licenses, contact our partners Fort Systems Ltd.