UCE: Fighting Junk/UCE/Spam

If you haven’t noticed yet, we're really seeing an increase in the volume of junk-mail/uce/spam as of late. As far as tools go, the obvious one is Microsoft's IMF for Exchange 2003 SP2. It's a good tool (not to mention free), and I've personally worked with organizations as large as 3,000 mailboxes that use the IMF (and hey, Microsoft uses it internally for about some 70,000+ mailboxes, so it must work).

That said, I have to say that I'm a huge fan of the Barracuda spam firewall appliance. Now, I know that some people - including Andy, have experienced real problems with support. While I can't say I've run into the issue, I am aware of it. In my experience, it's a great tool - mostly because it "just works", but also because I have something to go back to and show clients when they talk about spam and the volume of junk mail that they receive. I also am a big fan of the Bayesian filter because it too, just works.

The recent increase of junk has caused us to receive more UCE-support requests, for which we go though and review the junk on a weekly basis depending on our client contracts, in order to build-up the Bayesian database for the Barracuda appliances. So far we’re keeping up; but the increase is notable.