Barracuda Email Security Best Practices

By: Joe Vassalotti, Systems Engineer

As you are aware, Cetrom made a change with its spam vendor and moved services to Barracuda in the continuing effort of keeping up-to-date on email security. In addition, since the move, the new spam platform has blocked and cut down on Ransomware by 100%.

To help with the transition and to become more familiar with Barracuda, let us review how this change affects your experience with spam.

When you receive the email with the subject “Barracuda Email Security Service Quarantine Notification,” you have the option to review the emails not delivered to your inbox. The two choices you have are for the email(s) to be delivered or whitelisted.

Clicking the deliver option releases the email to your inbox, but that does not mark the sender as one you would like all correspondence to be received from. The whitelist option marks the sender as one you wish to always receive email from.

If you click the “Manage Quarantine” link in the email, you can access more options for your spam settings. By clicking on the “Message Log” tab, you can filter all emails sent to your address or break it down by emails quarantined or blocked.

You may notice some emails coming through that are not ones you want delivered and wish to mark as spam. Viewing the messages provides an option to mark email(s) as spam, which sends the email(s) to Barracuda for analysis. You also have the option to mark emails that were incorrectly marked as spam as not spam. This will also send the information to Barracuda for analysis, but it does not deliver the email to your inbox – you will still need to select to deliver the email.

We have all accidentally deleted or moved an email and have been unable to find it. With the new user interface for spam, when you are looking at the emails in the message log, you can go back one month and download the email to your desktop.

While in the user interface of Barracuda, you can add email addresses or domains to be blocked, exempt or quarantined through the “Settings” tab. After clicking on settings, you can select “Sender Policy” for modifications. The site tracks when the change saved and allows you to add a comment indicating why you chose to add the email address or domain.

Another option to look at under the settings was one previously not available. Accessing the “Quarantine Notification” tab gives you the option to choose an hour block for when Barracuda will send you an email notifying you of what emails were not marked as safe. If you prefer to see the email more than twice a day, you can now select to do so – and you can even get more granular and provide different times for each day of the week, if so desired.