Barracuda Reputation List: How It Impacts Your Emails

Summary

Background

The Barracuda Reputation Block List, also known as The BRBL, has been in public deployment since 2008. Barracuda Networks is a manufacturer of a hardware anti-spam appliances. Reports have been made that The BRBL is highly accurate, with an extremely low false positive rate of incident. Some are putting it ahead of their SpamHaus checks, and relying on the BRBL as their front line DNS blacklist.

Use of The BRBL is free, though they do ask that you register your servers IP address, so you can be authorized to use their system. Methods for gathering data on which IP addresses to list include the usual DNS blacklist techniques, such as spam traps, however, there is no manual addition of IP addresses to The BRBL. Significant amounts of IP data come from Barracuda Networks large installed base of hardware anti spam appliances. Each of these, if the user chooses to, can report analytical data back to The BRBL for possible inclusion. Barracuda Networks is at an advantage in their listing methods and accuracy; they have a large pool of paying customers using their hardware that help them collect the data they need about spammers. Barracuda Networks may be able to have tens of millions of data points per day as a result of their dominance in the anti-spam appliance market.

Listing criteria

Open relays, spam proxies, and spam traps are automatically listed the instant they are detected. If the IP address in question passes those basic tests, the email is then scored against The Barracuda Reputation System. This system, comprised of the shared data of many other Barracuda anti-spam appliances, will generate a score of how likely the message is to be spam. Similar to other systems like SORBS spam blocking service, if the message is determined to be spam, the senders IP will be added to The BRBL.

Zones

b.barracudacentral.org

b.barracudacentral.org will return the standard 127.0.0.2 IP address when queried if the SMTP server is listed. It is important that you register with Barracuda Central before querying their DNS servers; while it may initially work, until your IP address has been approved, there is no guarantee your query access will not be terminated.

Removal Process

Removal requests are handled manually, and investigated on a case by case basis. As with most DNS blacklists, removal is done by filling out The BRBL IP removal form. Most requests are honored within 24 hours. The BRBL also honors all whitelist requests on behalf of EmailReq.org. EmailReq.org is a DNS whitelist, which will investigate your request to have your domains whitelisted. if they find your network to be clean, after paying a small fee, you will be added to their whitelist. This in turn, will make it impossible for your IP address to ever be listed by The BRBL.

Related Articles

• General blacklist removal instructions
• Check to see if an IP is blacklisted
• How do I report spam?
• What is a DNSBL (blacklist)?
• Ask for help to diagnose and resolve listing issues