BARRACUDA SPAM FIREWALL FAQ
Last updated:
03/15/2005
Q: What is the “Barracuda SPAM Firewall?”
A: The Barracuda is a new server, recently
acquired and setup to work at ISONE for the purpose of increasing
our level of resolution to fight SPAM (unwanted, unsolicited emails).
This unit screens all incoming email destined to our customers’ email
inboxes, and checks it for viruses, worms, and SPAM oriented email
before it even gets to your inbox.
The Barracuda inserts itself, as an email
monitoring system, between the Internet and the mail server containing
your email box. In this way, it is able to screen out SPAM related email
and dispose of it without bothering the email server. Since the
barracuda unit is a highly specialized and dedicated equipment solely
designed for this purpose, it is an extremely efficient machine that is
helping organizations of all sorts to eliminate a high percentage of
spam related email.
The Barracuda unit is not, therefore, where your
email box resides, it is just a temporary place where the end user can
easily monitor email traffic passing through, attempting to be delivered
to his/her email box.
Q: I have received a “Summary” of quarantine and
blocked emails from the barracuda.isone.com, but when I try to log in,
it tells me wrong password. I am entering my regular email password, am
I missing something?
A: There is no synchronization occurring
between your regular email (i.e.
username@isone.com) account, and its password to the barracuda
unit. The unit will create this “summary” of quarantined emails and send
it to your attention to your regular email box. It has a link for you to
log into the unit and verify each email you received as to decide if,
indeed it is ok to be blocked, allow it to enter your email inbox, or
even put in on your white list. However, this is a temporary link with a
temporary password, which you do not need to even try to remember, but
it will expire after 24 hours. This does not mean you will not be able
to enter again into the unit, but you need to reset the password that
has expired. To do this, follow the link provided to you on your email,
and when you get to the Barracuda page stating “Error: Session
Expired”, enter your full email address in the “Username” field, and
click on the button below reading “Create New Password”. This
will instruct the barracuda server to email you a new password just to
enter to the unit and check the list of blocked/quarantined emails.
Important:
This will not change your regular email password; you do not have to do
any changes to your email settings.
_____________________________________________________
After you click on the “Create New Password”,
and you receive a new email on your inbox, which LOOKS like the
following example (Yours will be different):
-----------------------
Welcome to the
Barracuda Spam Firewall. This message contains the information you
will need to access your Spam Quarantine and Preferences.
Your account
has been set to the following username and password:
Username: yourusername@isone.com
Password: yourusernameXxx
You may login
using the following URL:
http://barracuda.isone.com:8000/cgi-bin/index.cgi?user=username@isone.com&password=d0347c782570c2344399222e&et=9899483616
Please be sure
to change your password.
----------------------
NOTE:
username@isone.com will be different for each user. It will be
your own username.
At this point, you can either return to the main
login page of the barracuda at
http://barracuda.isone.com:8000, enter your full email address and
the password provided in the “Password” field, as indicated above
OR
Simply click on the URL link provided to you, which
already contains your username and temporary password assigned to your
account on the barracuda server. You will then automatically enter your
personal settings.
Q: Will I have to keep resetting this temporary
password every time I need to log into the unit? It can be quite
annoying.
A: No, absolutely no, you do not have to do it
every time. For security reasons, the temporary password emailed to you
is meant to be, precisely, temporary. Once you log into the unit, you
will find at the top menu the option “Preferences”, if you click
on that tag, there will be another button, underneath the main menu,
reading “Security”. Click on that one, and in this area, you can
enter the old password, which was emailed to you in by the unit, and a
new password. By design, the temporarily created password is long and it
contains upper case and lower case letters and numbers. We strongly
encourage you to choose a password which follows the same policy, that
is, use upper and lower case letters and numbers and at least eight (8)
characters in length. This is done with the purpose of preventing
hackers (and other unwelcome guests) to guess your password.
Tip: Setting your password the same as your
email account makes this easy to remember and use.
Tip: If your username password is short and
easy to guess, it makes it easy to guess for an intruder, thus, be
careful selecting the length of your password. You can incorporate
numbers resembling or instead of some letter like number "3" for "e",
zero (0) instead of an "O", 1 instead of an "i", 7 instead of a "T", and
symbols like @, #, !, within. (i.e. Security --> S3cur1ty!). More
information about strong password choosing can be found at the following
link
Creating Strong Passwords.
Once you have saved your password, you can return
to the Barracuda server URL, and simply enter your email address and
your password to login.
Q: I am not sure to fully understand the
Quarantine Inbox menu. What do the links mean, etc?
A: The Quarantine Inbox screen is meant to
provide you with a user-friendly interface to the barracuda server,
which has put “on-hold” or blocked several emails, which are most likely SPAM. This box, which is not your email box, can be seen as a
“temporary detention center”. It is a place the barracuda unit utilizes
to detain certain “suspicious” email, and provide you, the end user,
with the last word as to deliver it one time only occurrence, white list
it, or delete it.
The screen looks like the following:
There are two tags 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 senders 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 do 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 handy.
It has the following options, which can be selected
by clicking on them:
Quarantine Enable/Disable:
Spam
Filter Enable / Disable:
Whitelist / Blacklist:
Quarantine Notification:
Security:
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