Barracuda ESG were physical or virtual appliances designed to protect email servers from spam, virus, spoofing, phishing and spyware attacks. The product line is discontinued.
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AppRiver from OpenText
Score 8.5 out of 10
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AppRiver from OpenText (formerly from Zix from 2019, which was acquired by OpenText), is a hosted messaging gateway and security platform featuring anti-spam and email encryption / data loss capability.
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Pricing
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)
AppRiver from OpenText
Editions & Modules
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No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)
AppRiver from OpenText
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)
AppRiver from OpenText
Features
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)
AppRiver from OpenText
Secure Email Gateway
Comparison of Secure Email Gateway features of Product A and Product B
Good combination when using their other products like an incident response. When using automated workflows, this makes creating sender policies a breeze. Unfortunately, this can also be done too well as it may filter out valid emails and to resend or place them back into users' mailbox isn't an easy thing to do even if you attempt to resend through the Email Security Gateway.
AppRiver is great for both small and large organizations. Small businesses are unlikely to have much if any technical support staff available to them, for which AppRiver would be a great help. Likewise for large companies, having AppRiver can save your tech support team from dealing with basic, common, and repetitive application support, and allowing them to better focus on more important tasks at hand.
ESS has a simple interface for both users and administrators.
The "Manage Quarantine" button in each email is a direct sign-on link, so users don't have to remember their password to manage their quarantine (this is GOLD, Jerry!).
The baseline functionality (catching spam/malware/phishing/malware attachments/malformed PDFs etc) is super-solid, with few false positives and few false negatives.
You need to take time in adding your contacts to a whitelist so that you don't miss an email.
I recommend changing the time interval; Barracuda notifies you that you have quarantined emails as we were only getting 1 per day and we missed some urgent emails.
The quarantine folder is web based, we'd prefer it to have been an add-in for Outlook.
They do not support DMARC and DKIM at this time and I don't know when or if they ever will.
Their SPF record is not great and can possibly cause issues, at least that is what my support company has told me.
Scanning of links in emails seems super limited and or non-existent. THings get through with completely bad malicious all the time and I assume they are not scanning them or they don't have a proper AV on their end.
Once a domain is whitelisted any bad emails that may be spoofing that email domain are let through and no other filters apply to the emails. It's frustrating to have to white list 20+ individual email addresses from a company and not be able to white list just the domain and not feel secure doing that.
Setting up the Barracuda for use with Microsoft 365 provides issues that Barracuda seems to have no fix for. I mentioned these issues to their support, because I am constantly reminded of them by their system, and I was told that those errors are normal for our setup and to ignore them which is frustrating to me.
The WebUI is the only piece I find lacking on the Barracuda ESK. Its is not the fastest and is fairly utilitarian in its approach. The Outlook plug-in, while not in wide use here, causes zero slowdown in Outlook or the Barracuda ESG.
Barracuda Email Security Gateway support is great at responding and escalating cases when needed. Timeliness is key when dealing with email attacks, spoofing or malware. Barracuda also has great resources for end-user training as our end users are our first line of defense in combatting attacks on our company. Training end-users pays off in time spent dealing with any email attacks
AppRiver's live support is above what I expected, and I use it exclusively. I always get a professional, courteous, and knowledgeable tech that is easy to understand within a few minutes of placing a call. If you do have to leave a message they have always promptly returned my call.
Barracuda integrates well with Office 365 and mail flow is great. It was the first solution we found that was part of a greater suite to fit all the requirements we had. With the Email Security gateway being in the cloud, it required no extra hardware but also nothing new installed on an endpoint as some solutions require.
AppRiver requires the least amount of management time, the pricing is better and the minimums are such that almost all SMB's won't be buying shelfware. If you are an MSP, become a partner and you will see spam problems become a thing of the past.
The gateway learns current scam which can prevent unmeasureable damage. As a government organization attacks on our network affect public safety.
Previous gateways I have managed have required significant amounts of time grooming. The Barracuda gateway has freed up a great deal of my time due to its intelligence and intent scanning.
I have very few incidences where a legitimate malicious email will pass through the filter. Just one of these emails can wreak havoc on an organization.