Knowledge Base

Using Barracuda Spam Firewall

This article describes how to enable and configure Barracuda Spam Firewall for your domain. Barracuda Spam Firewall helps reduce spam and protect your domain from harmful e-mail threats.

Table of Contents

Enabling Barracuda Spam Firewall
Editing domain settings
Disabling Barracuda Spam Firewall
Quarantined e-mail reports
More Information
Related Articles

Enabling Barracuda Spam Firewall

Barracuda Spam Firewall includes a cPanel plugin that makes it very easy to enable, configure, and disable.

When Barracuda Spam Firewall is enabled, your domain's MX (mail exchanger) record must also be updated:

If your domain uses A2 Hosting name servers, this DNS change happens automatically and you do not have to do anything else.
If you manage your domain's DNS settings yourself, however, you must enable Barracuda Spam firewall as described below, and then set your domain's MX record to point to barracuda.supercp.com. If you do not set the MX record correctly, your domain's e-mail will not work.

After your domain's MX record changes, it can take several weeks for mail servers around the world to update their caches with the new information. As a result, some messages may not pass through Barracuda Spam Firewall during this time. You should allow up to a month for Barracuda Spam Firewall to reach its maximum effectiveness.

To enable Barracuda Spam Firewall for your account, follow these steps:

Log in to cPanel.
If you do not know how to log in to your cPanel account, please see this article.
In the Mail section of the cPanel home screen, click Barracuda Spam Firewall:
Locate the domain for which you want to enable Barracuda Spam Firewall, and then click Enable:
Barracuda Spam Firewall is now enabled for the domain.

Editing domain settings

You can modify how Barracuda's spam filter works for your domain. However, A2 Hosting pre-sets the configuration with our recommended settings, so in most cases you should not have to change anything.

To view or modify the Barracuda settings for your domain, follow these steps:

Log in to cPanel.
If you do not know how to log in to your cPanel account, please see this article.
In the Mail section of the cPanel home screen, click Barracuda Spam Firewall:
Locate the domain for which you want to change or view the settings, and then click Edit Domain:

The configuration page appears:
To modify the Block, Quarantine, or Tag scores, type the new score value in the text box, and then click Save.
- A higher score indicates that a message is more likely to be blocked, quarantined, or tagged.
- A tagged message has [BULK] added to its subject line.
- A2 Hosting has no control over the scoring criteria and process; Barracuda does all message scoring and filtering.
To blacklist (automatically reject) messages from an e-mail address or domain, type it in the text box, select Block, Quarantine, or Tag, and then click the green plus sign (+).
To remove an e-mail address from the blacklist, click the red trash can icon.
To whitelist (automatically accept) messages from an e-mail address or domain, type it in the text box, and then click the green plus sign (+).
To remove an e-mail address from the whitelist, click the red trash can icon.
To change the destination server for e-mail messages, type the hostname or IP address in the Change Mail Destination text box, and then click Save.
This option is useful if you use CloudFlare to protect your domain, or if you want to route e-mail to a different server. For example, CloudFlare works by rerouting your site's traffic through their servers. This enables CloudFlare to serve your web site content, but CloudFlare does not process e-mail. To resolve this problem, you can use any of the following hostnames in the Change Mail Destination text box to ensure e-mail is routed correctly:
- cpanel.example.com or webmail.example.com, where example.com represents your domain name.
- Your A2 Hosting server name (for example, a2s88.a2hosting.com). For information about how to determine your account's server name, please see this article.

Disabling Barracuda Spam Firewall

To disable Barracuda Spam Firewall for your account, follow these steps:

Log in to cPanel.
If you do not know how to log in to your cPanel account, please see this article.
In the Mail section of the cPanel home screen, click Barracuda Spam Firewall:
Locate the domain for which you want to disable Barracuda Spam Firewall, and then click Disable:
Barracuda Spam Firewall is now disabled for the domain.

Quarantined e-mail reports

Your domain's e-mail users receive quarantine reports from Barracuda in their inbox whenever they have any new quarantined messages. These e-mail reports appear similar to the following:

Barracuda Spam Firewall - Sample quarantine report

When users click a hyperlink in a report and log in to their Barracuda Spam Firewall account, they see the following page:

Barracuda Spam Firewall - User quarantine inbox

Users can do any of the following actions to a quarantined message:

To deliver a message to the user's inbox immediately, click Deliver.
To whitelist a sender so any future messages are automatically delivered, click Whitelist.
To delete a message, click Delete.
To view a quarantined message, click the message's From or Subject information.

If users delete all of the quarantine reports from their inbox, they no longer have the hyperlinks that enable Barracuda account access. For information about how to recover access to a Barracuda account, please see this article.