Spamhaus and Barracuda Networks BRBL
With respect to Barracuda Networks and Spamhaus. I expect, but I do not know, that Spamhaus probes on port 25 in order to identify Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewalls and then block their access to their RBL. Many Barracuda customers have been cut off without warning causing them trouble and pain. Barracuda attempted to find a deal that would work for licensing Spamhaus for our products, however, spamhaus's desire for money could not be met without significantly increasing the price to each of our customers. They wanted us to charge the spamhaus feed price to each of our customers. We tried to find an arrangement for a long time. I personally love the work that spamhaus has done. I was disappointed that we could not find an arrangement once they changed into a commercial entity and started charging customers. When they were providing a free service we promoted them strongly, but when they started charging the customers that really used it, we had to part ways. It is a pity. We recommend customers use only Barracuda's Free RBL: "BRBL" and this is now built into the Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall. http://www.barracudacentral.org/rbl The BRBL is provided at no charge to anyone who wants to use it (even non barracuda customers). The BRBL has a full time staff that answers phone and email to correct any false positives and handle removal requests -- unlike competing services that charge money and who do not provide a staff. We will consider providing data feeds if anyone has interest. We currently provide the BRBL as a free service. We make no claims about it being better or worse than any other RBL. It does use a massive amount of data in order to determine which IP's should be on the list. Others have made claims about its accuracy and say great things about it. Others complain that we unjustly block them, however, 99.9% of the people who are blocked and who contact us find a BOT in their network. Sincerely, Dean Drako CEO Barracuda Networks
Dean Drako <drako@barracuda.com> writes: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ When they were providing a free service we promoted them strongly,
Translation: We made money using it and it didn't cost us anything.
but when they started charging the customers that really used it, we had to part ways.
Translation: Our customers complained about being asked to pay for something that we should have paid for, but it's cheaper to let our customers hang in the wind than to pay up. Sorry, I could let this pass without comment. -- Bob Poortinga K9SQL Bloomington, Indiana US
Is it your position that, as a vendor of antispam services, nobody else should offer their services for a fee? That would be strange indeed. On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 5:41 AM, Dean Drako <drako@barracuda.com> wrote:
With respect to Barracuda Networks and Spamhaus.
I expect, but I do not know, that Spamhaus probes on port 25 in order to identify Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewalls and then block their access to their RBL. Many Barracuda customers have been cut off without warning causing them trouble and pain.
Barracuda attempted to find a deal that would work for licensing Spamhaus for our products, however, spamhaus's desire for money could not be met without significantly increasing the price to each of our customers. They wanted us to charge the spamhaus feed price to each of our customers. We tried to find an arrangement for a long time. I personally love the work that spamhaus has done. I was disappointed that we could not find an arrangement once they changed into a commercial entity and started charging customers. When they were providing a free service we promoted them strongly, but when they started charging the customers that really used it, we had to part ways. It is a pity.
We recommend customers use only Barracuda's Free RBL: "BRBL" and this is now built into the Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall. http://www.barracudacentral.org/rbl
The BRBL is provided at no charge to anyone who wants to use it (even non barracuda customers). The BRBL has a full time staff that answers phone and email to correct any false positives and handle removal requests -- unlike competing services that charge money and who do not provide a staff. We will consider providing data feeds if anyone has interest. We currently provide the BRBL as a free service. We make no claims about it being better or worse than any other RBL. It does use a massive amount of data in order to determine which IP's should be on the list. Others have made claims about its accuracy and say great things about it. Others complain that we unjustly block them, however, 99.9% of the people who are blocked and who contact us find a BOT in their network.
Sincerely,
Dean Drako CEO Barracuda Networks
-- Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)
On 2/22/2010 12:40 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
Is it your position that, as a vendor of antispam services, nobody else should offer their services for a fee?
That would be strange indeed
Actually I can sympathize with Barracuda on this one: Bob's Widgets is running thier own mail server for their 25 employees. They decide the need better spam filters. They can hire Bob's nephew to drop in a Linux server running Postfix and SpamAssassan. In this situation it's OK for Little Bobby to configure the Spamhaus RBLs for use on this solution. They could also hire Barracuda to do essentially the same thing (assumption based on source code published at http://source.barracuda.com/source/ ). In this case Bob's Widgets is not allowed to use Spamhaus. Their list, their rules; but it is indeed strange to me. -- Dave
On 2/22/2010 1:40 PM, Dave Sparro wrote:
On 2/22/2010 12:40 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
Is it your position that, as a vendor of antispam services, nobody else should offer their services for a fee?
That would be strange indeed
Actually I can sympathize with Barracuda on this one: Bob's Widgets is running thier own mail server for their 25 employees. They decide the need better spam filters. They can hire Bob's nephew to drop in a Linux server running Postfix and SpamAssassan. In this situation it's OK for Little Bobby to configure the Spamhaus RBLs for use on this solution. They could also hire Barracuda to do essentially the same thing (assumption based on source code published at http://source.barracuda.com/source/ ). In this case Bob's Widgets is not allowed to use Spamhaus.
The issue is not whether Bob's can use the list to turn a profit, but whether Barracuda can.
Their list, their rules; but it is indeed strange to me.
-- "Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have." Remember: The Ark was built by amateurs, the Titanic by professionals. Requiescas in pace o email Ex turpi causa non oritur actio Eppure si rinfresca ICBM Targeting Information: http://tinyurl.com/4sqczs http://tinyurl.com/7tp8ml
On Mon, 2010-02-22 at 14:40 -0500, Dave Sparro wrote:
Their list, their rules; but it is indeed strange to me.
Not too strange: Little Bobby probably does one or two jobs and goes away, leaving the system to run by itself. the SpamAssassin people receive nothing from his choice of software. If Bob decides he wants to buy a commercial appliance from a profit-making company (presumption being made here) who are in turn making significant use of a "free" resource such as the SpamHaus lists in their appliance's configuration, and those appliances become very popular (as I understand they might be), then the infrastructure costs associated with the appliance are shifted away from both the vendor and the end-user onto the provider. If said provider gets a bit shirty about this and decides that they're going to analyse and block traffic from those appliances if they haven't paid for a service... If you stand back and look at this dispassionately then I would expect a large majority of this list would probably act in a similar way (or their companies or employers would) given a similar situation with their services. TANSTAAFL. Really. Someone has to pay for the meal; why should it be the chef? Graeme
On 2/22/10 11:40 AM, Dave Sparro wrote:
Actually I can sympathize with Barracuda on this one: Bob's Widgets is running thier own mail server for their 25 employees. They decide the need better spam filters. They can hire Bob's nephew to drop in a Linux server running Postfix and SpamAssassan. In this situation it's OK for Little Bobby to configure the Spamhaus RBLs for use on this solution. They could also hire Barracuda to do essentially the same thing (assumption based on source code published at http://source.barracuda.com/source/ ). In this case Bob's Widgets is not allowed to use Spamhaus.
Their list, their rules; but it is indeed strange to me.
Bob is in the widget business, he profits from selling widgets. He doesn't profit from the spam-filtering business. Spamhaus is, out of sheer niceness to the community, willing to accommodate one-off widget makers with some freebies. Thank you. Spamhaus. We appreciate it. Barracuda is in the spam-filtering business, they profit directly from it. Spamhaus isn't willing to allow a for-profit entity to deploy their filters on thousands of machines at substantial cost to Spamhaus in terms of bandwidth and server load without being compensated for it. This seems reasonable to me. If Bob's Widgets' nephew syncs Bob's machine to the University of Wisconsin's NTP server, it isn't a big deal. When Netgear hard-codes UoW's NTP server's IP into a gazillion consumer boxes, it is. That's the difference. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/ -- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
participants (7)
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Bob Poortinga -
Dave Sparro -
Dean Drako -
Graeme Fowler -
Jay Hennigan -
Larry Sheldon -
Suresh Ramasubramanian