In the old days, I made use of SpamCop to help me filter and block email based Spam. I found it to be a pretty good solution for my part time small business needs, but when they went down I was out of luck, because I had to go back and reroute my email every single time.  I finally gave up, because I found that a combination of gmail and Yahoo spam filters was doing the job for me.

Today, a new breed of anti-spam solutions have evolved from what I used to use and they seem to be far more robust and reliable than the solutions I used previously.

I recently took a look at the Hosted Barracuda  anti spam solution and it looks pretty impressive.

Our hosted Barracuda solution protects your email using twelve defense layers. With this multilayered approach, our firewalls provide the most comprehensive email protection available against spam, viruses, spoofing, phishing and spyware attacks.

Another nice aspect of this offering, is that if your mail servers are down, they will queue up your emails for you until you come back up. This means you are assured that your email won’t bounce and when you are back up, your users will not have missed a thing. That is an IT administrators dream if you ask me.

In addition, the company offers the Barracuda Spam Firewall so that those concerned about a hosted solution or down time, will be able to install their server device in their own facility for full control email protection.

Some strategic comments on their site:

  1. If I am an IT administrator, I want to know exactly what you are going to do for me. How will you make me a hero. Their site is all about them and not about their customers. Stop touting yourself and your abilities and tout what it is going to do for me.
  2. They need to focus more on overcoming the concerns that IT administrators will have about their email passing through the company’s hosted filters. That is a scary proposition for a lot of folks and they need to be fron and center about security, privacy, etc. and while that informaion is there, I need to see it and get hit over the head with it from the very beginning.
  3. Whee are the case studies? Where are the videos of happy admins who no longer have to worry about SPAM.

This is all in all a typical technology web site. It has some decent information and the products seem valuable, but they need to focus more on the solutions it provides to the problems their targets have.