Barracuda Spam Firewall…Two tips you may not know…

First I would like to say that I love the Barracuda Spam Firewall. It is a great device and does what it should, block spam.

It also has some really useful features which I will explain below…

There are a few things that you can do with the Barracuda, that most Admins do not realize and I will post these below:

First scenario…

Let’s say that your CEO (or another mailbox user) has fat fingered and deleted an important email. Don’t sweat it, you can easily locate and resend this email to the user using the Barracuda!

Open your Barracuda Spam Firewall’s admin page, navigate to Message Log, and search for the deleted email. There are a lot of different ways that you can search, I suggest searching “Inbound”, “To” and then the users “Email Address”.  The Barracuda will hold 8GB up to 2 TB of emails, depending on your model. I have seen messages stored for up to 6 months. It really just depends on which model Barracuda that you have and how many emails that your Barracuda filters.

1

Once you locate the deleted email, simply re-deliver it to the user:

Deliver (Send to Inbox)

To deliver an individual message to your Inbox, under Actions, click the Deliver link. To deliver multiple messages to your Inbox, select (check) multiple message, click the Deliver button.

That procedure will help you avoid the “dreaded mailbox restore” or having to restore your Exchange from a backup!

Another useful feature is the ability to open an email. Please note that only and ADMIN can do this, and in a lot of companies this is frowned upon. Personally there are only a few in my company that know I have this ability, as this “power” can cause hysteria with your users… (Most users think the admins can see all…and for the most part they are right!)

Second Scenario…

Lets say your management team needs to view an email of a director or user (sometimes they have valid reasons), you can easily locate the email in question in your Barracuda and view it, print it, or export it.

2

To view more information about a message on the Message Log page, click a message to
display the details window.
From the details window, click the following:
■ View Message tab to view the contents of the message
■ View Source tab to view the contents including email headers.

In Exchange there is no way to view a users email, other than logging into their email account using the web interface and their credentials (without 3rd party software), however this is easily done using the Barracuda!

As an Admin, just having these two added features makes the Barracuda Spam Firewall a justifiable purchase.

Not only will you have excellent spam/virus prevention, you will be gain some useful tools that are not found with Exchange!

Here are the product specifications on the Barracuda_Spam_&_Virus_Firewall_DS_US

Barracuda User Manual barracuda_usersguide

Comments
  1. Sec Tur says:

    I have read many great blogs, yours is one of my favorites. Keep up the good work.

  2. Jonah Kamensky says:

    Great blog!

  3. Vanessa Bruno says:

    I’m a d-bag comment spammer my IP is 23.238.229.234

  4. carlos garcia says:

    Great article… I no longer have to backup from exchange to locate an accidentially deleted email, I can just resend it!

    Keep up the great work!

  5. very helpful says:

    thanks for the useful recommendations and basically excellent info

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