It occurs to me that I’d love to do a lot of things that I don’t necessarily have time for in the day-to-day grind of work and home life. So, I figured I’d at least start trying to document some of them. Here’s the first one:

Barracuda Spam Firewall Mail Client Plugins

True, Barracuda supplies two plugins for Outlook and a plugin for Lotus Notes, but what about everyone else in the organization? Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Evolution and even Entourage users are left out in the cold. These users can’t take advantage of the nifty “train as spam” or “train as good” buttons which you can invoke on any email in your account. If all the organization’s mail is going through a ‘Cuda anyway, these functions can prove invaluable in increasing the accuracy of the ‘Cuda’s filters.

You don’t even need to be logged in to the Barracuda appliance; it apparently does a simple HTTP request using a base URL the Barracuda tucks into a header of every message it processes. The trick is figuring out what the HTTP request really is. Now, this will really be as easy as forging one of these headers to point to a different URL, and just seeing what the buttons do by watching the server logs (or even just running netcat on the appropriate port). I haven’t gotten around to it yet, because I’ve got lots of “real” work to do, but someday I’ll decode the URL magic.

That’s when the real meat of the project comes in: building plugins/extensions for Thunderbird and Apple Mail. (No, honestly, I don’t really care about Evolution or Entourage.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.