Barracuda spam firewall and internal, known domains

Posted by p_lider August 23rd, 2010

While configuring the Barracuda SPAM Firewalls it can be logical to add your email server’s domain to the trusted senders’ domains and to the trusted relay domains – nothing more confusing! Doing so will make a lot of spam coming through your firewall because many times spammers modify email headers in such a way, so they pretend to be from your server’s domain. Moreover, doing so will render your spam firewall to be an open relay for a part of spam with such modified headers.

So let this be a lesson for everyone – do not trust anyone, even your own domain, when it comes to defense against spam.

I think, that someone from Barracuda Network shall think too about improving the defense mechanism – why the firewall does let emails from trusted domains get relayed even if they were sent from an external, not known IP addresses?