It’s kind of funny how big of a market spam killing has become. Everybody hates spam, and if you can figure out a way to kill it, better than anyone else can, you’ve got a gold mine one your hands. What’s more, a good spam filtering service gets nothing but love from its users, because, well, that’s simply what you deserve when you do your customers the service of killing anywhere from 98% of all spam, to 100%. Even if you’re giving away a free spam killer, the ad revenue from your site alone will keep your bills paid, as long as your spam killer is any good, that is.
So one of the bigger companies in this market is Barracuda Networks. They’re one of the few companies in the game with a hotline service, and their website proudly declares “THE WORLDWIDE LEADER IN EMAIL AND WEB SECURITY!” and yes, it’s all caps, and in bold letters, just like it’s written above, go and see for yourself!
So what we’re here for today is to see whether or not they actually live up to that claim (and if they do, whether or not they deserve that role!). To be clear, we’re not getting any revenue from them for writing this, so we’re going to be giving you a completely unbiased report.
Right on the front page, they boast of having blocked a whopping one point two billion or so emails out of one point three billion received. Of course, that only tells us two things: They have a lot of users, and they block eighty something percent of all emails sent through their filter. The question remains, are they good at blocking spam? Or do they just block a bunch of email, and hope that most of it happens to be spam?!
Here’s what makes us want to give them the benefit of the doubt, though; the system only deletes emails based on your settings. So if it keeps deleting notifications from your message board or something, you can easily just adjust the settings.
Users tend to think pretty highly of it, and we’ll go ahead and admit that, in the, that’s usually a pretty clear indicator of how effective a product is. The one complaint that seems to pop up now and then is that it can be a little tricky to use if you don’t feel like reading the howto. That can be easily fixed by, well, by reading the howto of course.
So is it truly the king of spam blockers?
Well if we flat out say “yes”, then we’ll be sure to get plenty of replies arguing the contrary! So our advice is to simply try Barracuda out for yourself, and see whether or not it kicks your old spam filter right in the trash.
