Here’s how the Barracuda filter works:

a)     Every message to us first gets routed to C:Support to be filtered.

b)    Barracuda assigns the message a rating from 0 to 10.  A rating of 0 means it is not spam at all.  A rating of 10 means it is spam with 100% certainty.  Barracuda is designed to “learn” over time what is and isn’t spam.  Not just from the messages sent to yourdomain, but from messages sent to all of the clients all over the U.S. that it is filtering for.

c)     All messages with a rating of 0 will be allowed to pass through the filter and to our Inboxes at yourdomain.  (Messages that are “white-listed” will be rated 0 and will pass through without a hitch.  More on white-listing below.)

d)    All messages with a rating of 3 to 10 we will never see.  Barracuda will block them as spam.  (If for some reason a message wrongly gets rated a 3 or above, C:Support will have access to it for about a week.)

e)     All messages with a rating above 0 but below 3 (i.e. between 0.001 and 2.999) will be quarantined by Barracuda.

f)     Each day at 3:30 pm, you will receive an email from Barracuda, listing the messages rated 0.001 to 2.999 that have been quarantined.  You may scan the list and allow any that should not be quarantined to pass through.  The software will then “learn” that that sender is a safe sender.

g)    You also have the ability of going to and checking the messages in your quarantine folder AT ANY TIME.  Click on the link in the message from Barracuda that you received this morning, that I said above you should keep.  That link will take you to YOUR quarantine folder.  (Or you may save the website address in your Favorites and access it that way.)  This is how, for example, you would check to see if the filter caught a message that somebody is saying they sent to you already, but you are not receiving it.

h)     The link just mentioned will also take you to the place where you can set preferences for the filter.  Do so by clicking on the Preferences tab at the top of the screen.  At the Preferences screen, you can insert email addresses or email domains (like @yourdomain.org or @csupportinc.com) that you want to white-list (that is, put on your “good” list, so messages will not be stopped) or black-list (that is, put on your “bad” list, so messages will be stopped or filtered)