Let us think, maybe the company needs to be re-branded. Maybe the new name could be Pol Pot or Adolf Hitler or George W. Bush. This might provide a better representation of what the current John Hancock is all about. A little truth in advertising, if you will.

Of course, I kid. Honestly, the fact that John Hancock employees cannot reach BostonGeek from work anymore probably has more to do with some crappy content-filtering service in place on a firewall. And, of course, said content-filtering service has classified BostonGeek as child-porn because the word pedophile was mentioned a thousand times in jest. Oh well. Now the employees of John Hancock will have to wait until they are in the privacy of their own home to read BostonGeek. Surely, this will affect employee morale and John Hancock shall suffer irreparably.

So, to get back to my point, I get a lot of cold calls. For a lot of different products and services. Some of which make absolutely no sense to me. Sometimes, though, one actually offers something I just happen to be in the market for. Enter Barracuda Networks, makers of the Barracuda Spam Firewall.

I was offered a 30-day trial on this particular piece of hardware, so I took them up on it. I mean, the buyout price, if it worked, was spectacular, at under $2000 for a 1U rackmount box and about $700 annually for the service subscription. For an enterprise-level spam filter, that’s not just a good deal, it’s a great one. If it works. Especially since my company, like all companies, gets inundated with spam.

So I gave them a chance and told them to send one down. I ordered the Spam Firewall 300. A few days later we received the box, opened it, and extracted the thin rackmount appliance with the fish for a logo. I was surprised at the design. Didn’t look like much. The thought that this machine could cut our spam by 80% or more seemed almost amusingly farfetched.

Set-up was exceedingly simple. An instruction sheet came with it, indicating how one should use the console to log in and set up things like IP address, passwords, and filtering options. Walking through those was easy. We set up our domain names and then physically placed it between our firewall and our email server. Then we pointed all incoming email to the Barracuda first, so it would then pass on to the Exchange server.

And that’s pretty much it. Basically, the Barracuda is in constant contact with Spamhaus, SpamCop, and Ordb. Whenever an email comes in from an external email address, the first thing that is checked is the sender domain. If it is listed at one of those services, it is instantly blocked. We can also add domains to our own blacklist, though that is rarely necessary. If a new spam domain gets set up, there is typically a 24-hour lag time before SpamHaus gets it, verifies it, and updates the Spam Firewall. All automatically. It has never crashed on me, never hiccupped, and never blocked something it shouldn’t.

It has, as I mentioned, a blacklist feature. But it is also highly customizable in other areas. There is a whitelist (to keep important email addresses and/or domains from getting blocked), filtering of all sorts (so in-depth we rarely actually touch it for anything), and one of my favorite features: logging.

I don’t mean that the Barracuda just logs incoming and outgoing emails, though it definitely does. I mean it actually keeps a copy of every email that comes in from an external address or goes out to one, for 30 days. This is extremely useful when tracking down security breaches, email policy violators, and other ne’er-do-wells who think that deleting their sent items saves them from being found out. In my own paradoxical way, I am a Libertarian/Orwellian. I chafe at the yoke of the system I am a part of, but at the same time… power is good, when it’s in my hands.

So here is a box that does it all. Logs emails, blocks spam, keeps me from having to mess around with ineffective or system-hogging software on the Exchange server. Needless to say, we bought it. We’ve had it for about 6 months now. And I couldn’t be happier with it.