Cheaper than a Barracuda -- but you get what you pay for.

Spam is a fact of life in today's world of email. I typically recommend Barracuda spam appliances to my clients, because they do a great job at filtering spam, and I've found them to be reliable. However, an antispam appliance is an expensive proposition for a small or medium size business.

One client had purchased their own antispam device -- namely the Sonicwall ES 300. Although this particular client was another tech's account, I went along when he set this up in order to see how it stacked up against the competition.

The Sonicwall ES300 fits in a standard 1U rack. Unlike Barracuda, they will openly tell you the statistics of the machine. It has a 2.55 Ghz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and an 80 GB hard drive. There is no RAID for fault tolerance, but the lower-end Barracudas don't have RAID either. Network connectivity is supplied through a Gigabit Ethernet connection.

The UI of the Sonicwall is more polished than the Barracuda, which is strictly white-on-black. It's just about as easy to set up. We had it up and running in about half an hour. It's also about $300 cheaper than a Barracuda 200, which does have to figure into a decision of a $1500 or so device.

Like the Barracuda, the Sonicwall E-Mail Security 300 phones home and downloads updates on the fly. The E-Mail Security 300 has different levels of pricing depending on how many users you have, whereas Barracuda charges one price and you can have as many users as you want. I personally like Barracuda's structure better, just because I know if I got an unexpectedly higher bill because I'd gone from 49 users to 51 over the course of a year, I'd be annoyed.

Spam filtering is very good out of the box and gets better. Like most antispam solutions, the ES 300 uses Bayesian filtering among other means; it starts to learn from what it's seen. If, for example, you work for a car dealership, then mail that contains words like 'engine hoist' and 'hydraulic' are probably not spam; that's probably email to your clients and your vendors. If people mark spam that gets through (and some always does) as spam, then the ES 300 will know for next time.

The Sonicwall ES 300 also offers one thing that the Barracuda 200 doesn't (but the Barracuda 300 does): the opportunity to make your users manage their own spamboxes. So, a more polished UI, just about as good, and less money. Why would anyone not go for the Sonicwall ES 300?

Well, I have a good reason now.

The Barracudas I have put up have generally done the job all by themselves, without needing my input (although I do check them from time to time.) The Sonicwall ES 300 didn't score well on reliability. Shortly after their usual tech had taken off on vacation, they called with a problem. The Sonicwall had stopped working. Power cycling it (that's tech speak for 'turn it off and on again' resolved the issue for about an hour, when it stopped again.

So, no problem, the Sonicwall ES 300 was under warranty, so we called Sonicwall tech support.

Where a rather bored young lady transferred us to the appropriate department, which turned out to be a voicemail box. SO I left a message, and waited and waited. I didn't get a callback, so I called back only to be told the same thing: I could only speak with a technician in that queue by leaving my name and number.

Which they did -- three days later. Three days later, they remoted into the ES 300 and had it fixed up in short order. But three days without email is unacceptable in an enterprise environment.

Now that is merely my experience, and it's only with one device. And to be fair, I've heard horror stories about Barracuda tech support. But on the other hand, it's worth pointing out that I've never needed Barracuda tech support because the products just work. The Sonicwall ES 300 failed a few months after it was put into production. A few hundred bucks and a polished UI is not going to make up for a lack of reliability and lackadaisical tech support. Not for something as critical as email. I know I'd be very leery of recommending an ES 300 again.