After a message travels through the initial filtering layers of the Barracuda Email Security Gateway, it is assigned a score based on the probability that it is spam. The administrator can decide how to deal with messages based on the Spam Scoring levels (from 0 to 10): allow, tag, quarantine or block, as set on the BASIC > Spam Checking page.
- Tagging the message means the user will receive the message in their regular mailbox with the subject text modified to indicate that the message might be spam.
- Quarantining the message means that the message will either be delivered, with the subject text modified to indicate that the message might be spam, to a special "quarantine inbox" assigned to a user or to a "global" quarantine mailbox designated by the administrator.
- Blocking the message means it will not be delivered.
Messages can also be determined to be quarantined (as opposed to allowed, blocked or tagged) by custom policies you set based on domain name, IP address, region, content filters and other filtering tools in the BLOCK/ACCEPT pages. Spam Scoring and some block/accept policy settings can be further refined at the domain level and/or per-user level, depending on what the administrator enables on the USERS > User Features page at the global level and what the Domain Admin role enables on the USERS > User Features page at the domain level. For more information on the Domain Admin and other account roles, please see Roles and Navigating the Web Interface.
Quarantine can be enabled or disabled completely. If it is enabled at the global level, no messages are stored on the Barracuda Email Security Gateway; rather, all quarantined mail is sent to the Quarantine Delivery Address you specify on the BASIC > Quarantine page. If it is enabled at the per-user level, user accounts are created on the Barracuda Email Security Gateway for users listed either in the authentication server (see Automatic Account Creation) or in the local database on the Barracuda Email Security Gateway. Quarantined messages need to be received and determined to either be delivered to the user’s regular email inbox or deleted.
As the administrator, you can configure a Retention Policy to limit the amount of disk space used for storing each user's quarantined messages, thereby conserving system resources on the Barracuda Email Security Gateway. Alternatively, messages can be scheduled for regular purging based on age and/or size (see Retention Policy and Purging Old Messages).