From this forum, I found and have now installed the Barracuda 300 (with Outlook plugins).
My other spamware solution was from Trend Micro. It was filtering about 3-4k e-mails per day on top of the various blocks I had set up with Exchange 5.5. During this time, an unrelated problem led to the discovery that our MX record was pointing to a second non-existent mail server. This explained why some users were not getting some e-mails that were not being blocked. Once that was corrected, our daily traffic increased to 4-5k per day.
Enter the Barracuda. Easy to set up. I quietly turned it on to the system on 7/2 with no user knowledge so I could test any response from them.
What I found astounding me, even today. We suddenly started seeing 8-10k e-mails per day being filtered. We are now seeing 18-20k per day after the holiday week (spammers take vacations?). My personal spam per day has dropped from 80-100 to 10 or so and is getting even less as the filter learns new spam. Other users have reported similar drops. My time on administrating spam has dropped from several hours per week to about an 1/2 hour per day and that's only because it's fun to check. It will drop to 1/2 hour per week or less after the evaluation is completed.
As of this morning, we will pass the 225k mark of filtered e-mails. Less than 1 percent has passed as good or tagged as possible spam and about half or more of that is actually spam. To date, I have only found 1 e-mail that was good that was marked as spam by the software.
Downside? We are Terminal Server/ Citrix based and the Outlook plugin proved to be difficult to install. It is installed now and working fine but does not install as Barracuda intended. Reporting is a little weak and a few more controls might be nice. On the other hand, this is definitely a set and forget appliance.
I would say that the Barracuda will be a keeper at the end of our evaluation period. I will continue to run our Trend product as additional Virus/Spam filter.
While its obvious that the amount of our incoming e-mail hasn't really changed, it does shows just how much our Exchange Server was filtering out on its own but could never report.
I had no idea we were being inundated by so much junk!