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RyanIrish

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3rd party email spam filter options

Greetings experts!

We are currently running Exchange 2010 on site and still using the same 3rd party company hosting Barracuda that I inherited when I started here.  We are looking to replace this service with another company and I'm just curious about my options.  Barracuda has been fine, it's the host company we are looking to move on from...

Do many/most running Exchange still use 3rd party services like this, or am I stuck in the past?

Is Barracuda considered THE filter, and it's just a matter of who hosts, or are there better alternatives?

We are currently paying $12 per seat, per year, for 40 users...sound about right?

I guess I'm just looking for suggestions or examples of what others in similar environments are running.

Thanks for any input!
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MasterNe0

Their a bunch of spam filters host out there and both on-site and off-site host options.

Their mcafee, symantecs, rackspace, appriver just to name a few.

It all depends on your price range, whether you want on-site/off-site and such.
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We host our own Exchange server so this may not fit.  We used to have a Barracuda appliance for SPAM filtering. It is a very good product.

We recently (last few years) moved to a Sophos appliance. It also is a good product. The main reason we moved to it was that we purchased a bundle that provided several features. We were moving to a single point of contact for AV, Proxy, SPAM, etc.

There are other options such as Mimecast and other mail hosting providers however they don't all expose what they use for SPAM filtering.  You can either set up to have all mail sent to them first which will run through their filtering or you can do as we have and have email sent to us, run through our filtering and Exchange and then it basically gets journaled to them. There are good and bad points about both options.
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Thanks for the input.  I do like the idea of could filters queuing emails if the server goes down, which has happened a few times.

I think I might just need to shop around find a better host for Barracuda.  Ours likes to charge us for 45 minutes of 'programming work' when we ask to add a single email account to our filter.
With big companies  they usually per onsite but since you said that a few times the onsite location has went offline, off-site might be a good choice for you.

You just need to shop around and see if they have deals for certain number of users.

With Symantecs/Mcafee that we use for our clients, we haven't had a big issue.

Also be aware if you have certain rules or filters in place, you have to recreate them with the new host and keep a good eye on it and update things where needed.
You should have a web-based management portal that you can manage the Barracuda even if it is hosted.  Managing it yourself should save you the "programming work" fee
I agree, pony, that seems to be the method by which they get away with over-charging for menial maintenance...
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That looks like what I'll do!  

Cheaper, for more seats, with more control!  Thanks for the advice!