In the last few months, blogs and forums have been in a bit of a frenzy over the possible EmailReg and Barracuda connection, and what it all means.

http://www.debian-administration.org/users/simonw/weblog/295

To anyone not in the loop, let’s summarize: Barracuda’s antispam appliance (spam assassin) is blocking certain legitimate safe domains that are sending email to receivers behind a barracuda box. The autokickback messages senders have been receiving, from this barracuda box, basically say that their IT administrator needs to register their domain at EmailReg for $20 per domain per year. IT admins of course are objecting to this, but don’t really have a choice because the Barracuda box will keep blocking their sender’s emails from their domain. So cough up $20.

Now, allegations are swirling that this is – in some form or another – blackmail because of a number of connections that have been dug up between EmailReg and Barracuda. EmailReg is a not-for-profit safe domain list. Barracuda has donated $$ and boxes to EmailReg, and says so, on their web site. http://www.barracudacentral.org/about/emailreg People that have paid that $20 to EmailReg are thinking that they are having to pay because barracuda is intentionally blocking them.

However …
EmailReg has this posted on their website: http://www.emailreg.org/index.cgi?p=news&id=4

As fun as it would be if all of the conspiracy theorists were right on this, it looks like there really is no funny business happening here. Yes, Barracuda has given money to EmailReg, but EmailReg is trying to fix the spam problem everyone is facing – albeit in a bit of a convoluted way (a whitelist you have to pay to get on? my mind is flooded with a hundred ways to work around this or simply abuse it).

The take-away here though: Barracuda is not winning the battle with spam, and is being forced to look elsewhere for a solution. Spam is getting worse every day and no matter what filtering technology you are using, IT DOES NOT WORK. Barracuda is taking a stance and supporting EmailReg, most likely to, in the future, put another bandaid on the problem of spam and charge their users accordingly. Gotta pay for that large marketing budget, right?

But instead of forcing the good guys to cough up money to solve the spam problem, isn’t there a better way? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: SPF, DKIM and challenge response are the way to go when attacking the core problems we’re facing here. Let’s demand solutions that don’t involve a $20 credit card charge and that sinking feeling that you really don’t know where your money is going.