Key Email Protection Features for Businesses

Barracuda combats, detects and blocks phishing attempts by combining anti-fraud intelligence, behavioral and heuristic detection, protection against sender spoofing (i.e., spammers spoofing valid email addresses), and domain-name validation.

Get protection against social-engineering attacks with Barracuda Integrated Email Protection.

Malware protection analyzes attachments, URLs and email content in real time to block malicious files before they reach users. Barracuda leverages the cloud for dynamic, real-time threat analysis, attachment sandboxing and URL protection to prevent malware from affecting email users.

Detects and blocks malicious QR codes embedded in emails to prevent users from being redirected to phishing sites or malware at scan time and click time.

More sophisticated attackers make clever modifications to URLs, so they look genuine but aren’t. The most common technique is omitting letters or using convincing “typos” that even users who check URLs before clicking often miss. Barracuda’s link protection includes typosquatting detection, which automatically identifies and redirects these URLs to our sandbox at click time to block malicious activity.

As virus attacks become more sophisticated and complex, email infrastructure requires advanced virus protection. Barracuda scans email and incoming files using three powerful layers of polymorphic virus scanning technologies. Barracuda also decompresses archives for complete protection. Powerful virus definitions are automatically updated to maintain the most up-to-date protection against email-borne viruses.

Not every attack is focused on planting a virus, getting users to send their credit card numbers or to click a malicious link. Often, the objective of the attack is focused on disabling a network or mitigating its effectiveness. As a cloud-based service, Barracuda Email Protection is positioned to stop spammers before they overload your email server.

Outbound filtering prevents your organization from being put on spam blocklists and prevents outbound attacks from originating inside your network. Employees can inadvertently cause internal systems to become a source for botnet spam. Using a subset of its defense layers, Barracuda’s outbound filtering stops outbound spam and viruses.

Barracuda Email Continuity Service ensures that email operations continue by failing over to a cloud-based email service in the event primary email services become unavailable. During email server outages, an emergency mailbox allows users to continue sending, receiving, reading, and responding to email.

Barracuda uses advanced analysis to understand normal email behavior, such as who communicates with whom, how messages are written and typical timing patterns, to identify suspicious activity. By focusing on behavior instead of static rules or signatures, Barracuda Integrated Email Protection can detect sophisticated threats that blend in with everyday email.

Barracuda Integrated Email Protection analyzes the language and intent of email messages to understand what an email is trying to do — not just how it looks. By evaluating context, tone and the nature of the request, Barracuda can identify social engineering, phishing and impersonation attacks that are designed to sound legitimate and bypass traditional keyword or rule‑based detection.

Analyze trusted relationships in your organization to spot unusual or unexpected interactions. This ability helps detect impersonation and business email compromise attempts, including first‑time sender attacks and messages that abuse established trust between employees, partners or executives. 

Detect phishing and impersonation attacks written in multiple languages, not just English. This ensures consistent protection for global organizations, helping prevent threats that target users in specific regions or rely on language differences to bypass traditional filters.

Barracuda Integrated Email Protection continuously inspects links to see where they actually lead and how they behave at the moment a user interacts with them. By following redirects, analyzing destinations and detecting suspicious behavior in real time, Barracuda Integrated Email Protection stops malicious links that evade reputation checks or become weaponized after delivery without relying on user clicks or time-of-click inspection, enabling earlier and more accurate detection of evasive threats.

Combine all quarantined emails into a single, centralized view, giving administrators full control from one place. By eliminating the need to switch between consoles, teams improve visibility across email security layers and can review, release or delete quarantined messages faster and with greater confidence.

Value reporting clearly shows where email threats are stopped so you can see exactly how Barracuda Integrated Email Protection complements native security, prove ROI and understand where real risk remains.

Explainable AI with Bailey provides clear, AI‑assisted explanations that show why an email was blocked or allowed, using plain language. By translating complex detection signals into easy‑to‑understand insights, Bailey helps you quickly confirm decisions, resolve false positives and act with confidence.

By detecting anomalies in internal employee communications, Barracuda can automatically detect when employee accounts become compromised and are used to send malicious emails to recipients. Administrators get alerted when an account has been compromised, and they can take immediate action. 

Barracuda automatically quarantines phishing emails that allow attackers to steal employee credentials and can lead to account takeovers. 

Detect suspicious logins by tracking Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that exhibit suspicious behavior, such as failed sign-ins, and share intelligence across all users and accounts. Track each user’s access patterns and alert IT administrators when Barracuda observes unusual sign-in activity, such as from an unusual device or geography. The AI tracks user-level and organization-wide patterns.

Changes to a user’s email inbox rules can potentially indicate an account takeover. Barracuda detects and alerts on unauthorized inbox rule modifications, which provides visibility across the entire email environment.

Use Barracuda Integrated Email Protection to identify users who received malicious email and automatically send alerts notifying them of an incident. These emails can be sent in bulk to all affected users.

Users can report phishing and other suspicious emails to their IT administrators directly from the Outlook Essentials Message Actions add-in. This feature provides end users with a simpler way to report suspicious emails to their IT department. Reported messages will appear in the dashboard for IT to review, investigate and take corrective action.

Barracuda helps administrators lock out attackers from compromised accounts, preventing them from using the compromised account to launch phishing campaigns and forward emails externally.

Your emails can travel through many different servers before they reach the intended mailbox. Barracuda secures your mail by encrypting it during transport to the Barracuda Message Center, encrypting it at rest for storage in the cloud, and providing secure retrieval by your recipients through HTTPS Web access. Data in motion is secured via Transport Layer Security (TLS) and data at rest is secured via AES 256-bit encryption.

If you are sending a sensitive email, you can manually mark it for encryption. However, you can also create a policy to automatically encrypt emails based on their sender, content and other criteria. Encryption policies ensure that your organization complies with regulations designed to protect customer data, such as HIPAA.

Outbound filtering keeps sensitive data from leaving your organization while simultaneously ensuring that legitimate emails are delivered. At the same time, outbound filtering blocks outbound spam and viruses, preventing your employees or other infected clients from inadvertently sending malicious email, as well as keeping your mail server IP addresses and domains from being listed on spam-block lists.

Employees can inadvertently allow their email to be used for botnet spam. The outbound filter stops outbound spam and the spread of viruses.

Administrators can also create and enforce content policies to prevent sensitive data from being sent by email, such as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, HIPAA data, customer lists, and other private information. Policies can automatically encrypt, quarantine, or block certain outbound emails based on their content, sender, or recipient.

Barracuda helps customers correctly configure their DKIM and SPF, as well as troubleshoot common problems in SPF/DKIM configuration, such as domain misalignment.

Customers can get high-level insights on the different email systems sending emails with their domains and gain access to in-depth information, including which IPs are passing and failing DMARC, domain misalignment, and spoofing samples.

Barracuda’s domain fraud protection prevents third parties from maliciously spoofing domains. Barracuda Integrated Email Protection leverages DMARC to gain visibility into legitimate and non-legitimate emails being sent with a particular domain and enables customers to make sure their legitimate emails are delivered correctly while blocking the malicious senders. 

DMARC reports are automatically gathered, analyzed, and visualized. Customers simply need to change their DNS record using the setup wizard provided. Barracuda takes care of the reporting and analysis of the DMARC logs. 

By leveraging Barracuda's IP reputation databases, we can provide detailed information on the source of spoofing emails, including geographic and sender information, as well as samples of spoofing emails.

Post‑delivery clawback automatically removes emails that become malicious after delivery, closing the post-delivery gap attackers rely on to launch delayed phishing and link‑based attacks. By monitoring delivered messages and acting the moment risk changes, Barracuda Integrated Email Protection eliminates the need for manual cleanup or user reporting, which prevents evolving threats from turning into account takeover.

Automatically remediate email messages that contain malicious URLs or attachments. All user-reported messages are automatically scanned for malicious content. When a threat is detected, all matching emails are moved from users’ mailboxes into their junk folders. Security teams will get an alert notifying them of an incident.

Bulk remediation lets MSPs and IT teams remove malicious emails across users and customers with a single action, delivering faster, scalable protection with less effort.

Email attacks come in waves. When you activate continuous remediation, incident Response will continue to delete any copies of the email that appear in inboxes for 72 hours after the initial remediation has completed.

Build custom playbooks to completely automate your incident response process. Admins at any technical level can create a workflow and add complexity by defining a trigger, determining conditions and assigning the desired actions through a simple user interface.

New content is added, every day creating endless combinations of email templates, landing pages, email account senders, and web server domains. As the threat landscape changes so will our tests, giving you access to the most up-to-date content.

All content can be found in the Content Center Marketplace, a one-stop shop for browsing, selecting, and importing the perfect content to craft your continually evolving campaigns.

Add that special touch by customizing any of the templates, so your simulated attacks come from people in positions of trust, effectively testing your workforce and teaching them to be wary of threats that only your organization may have seen.

In today’s threat landscape, you can be phished from more than just email. Train your team on every facet of threat with Barracuda’s multi-variable campaigns that include Smishing (SMS/Text), Vishing (Voicemail) and Found Physical Media. This unique capability will help prevent users from receiving the same mock phishing template in a campaign and can allow for hypothesis-based testing (A/B tests).

Using the same Smart Attachment technology found in our email campaigns, you can distribute files on portable drives and cards with watermarks in a variety of file formats to track who is willing to plug it into your network. The files won’t cause security problems even if non-employees find them as the content redirects users to landing pages designed to educate on the perils found in anonymous portable media.

Crafting effective scenarios is paramount when developing an effective anti-spear-phishing campaign, especially in long-term approaches where users would start seeing repetitive emails. Prevent that by using Barracuda’s advanced threat simulation features, including time stamping to create a sense of urgency, prompting users to respond before they can think it through, phone home macros, DLP tagging, geolocation, and more. Our patented system allows for multiple combinations of email templates, landing pages, email account senders, and web server domains in a single campaign.

Enable easy tracking of user phishing attempts with the Phish Reporting Button, simplifying the task of reporting possible threats while tying in user reporting to your training regimen.

Why stop at username and email address, when you can test based on location, job function, tenure, privileged credentials, and access to sensitive networks and applications? Barracuda gives you granular control of your reports, such as that your mid-level marketing managers in Kansas are more likely to click a link in an email on Tuesday, as well as testing and education, so your workforce isn’t inundated with emails they shouldn’t get.

More than 16,000 data points are at your disposal with Barracuda’s advanced metrics and reporting. Identify levels of risk at macro and micro levels in your organization, to help expedite remediation while keeping your workforce at maximum efficiency by targeting training to only those who need testing at that moment.

Worried about data leaking from your organization? With Barracuda’s built-in Data Loss Prevention Activator, you can track where those campaign emails and portable media drops go and who accesses it, to know who might leak your company data as well.

Is your workforce leaning hard on whether there’s an encryption symbol next to the URL when they click links in their emails? With HTTPS and SSL landing pages you can collect information from your users without the possibility of people snooping that information and using it against you, while convincing your users that they are safe.

Engage your users and make the cat-and-mouse aspect of security awareness fun by turning the workflow into a game with leaderboards and user-leveling systems. This will help train users to spot and report threats while keeping the idea of spear phishing at the forefront of their mind.

Should a CEO or accounts payable team get the same test as your engineer, nurse, or teacher? With Barracuda, you can issue risk-based surveys that provide unique insights into your user-level security posture. By being better informed about your user-level risk and validating it throughout the year, you will maintain a security plan that mirrors your organizational objectives.

To support your computer-based training initiatives, Barracuda provides supplementary materials, such as two-minute best practice videos covering topics like malware awareness and password security. In addition, there is an array of bonus training materials, including posters, newsletters, infographics, and tip sheets. Barracuda has partnered with several reputable content vendors to augment our built-in content.

Hosting production data in the cloud does not mitigate the need for backup and recovery. Emails and important documents are susceptible to corruption and risk being unrecoverable due to malicious attacks or accidental deletion. Barracuda Email Protection includes Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, which protects Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Planner, Teams, and Entra ID data, by backing it up directly to the cloud.

Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup offers unlimited storage and retention for your Microsoft 365 email, SharePoint, and OneDrive data, including folder structure, attachments, calendars, contacts, schedules, and tasks. Recover individual files and email accounts with point-in-time accuracy, to the same account/location or to a different account/location.

Barracuda provides a cloud-based archive of all email communication, to ensure that you meet demanding business and legal requirements. It follows the accepted “best practice” approach for compliance by archiving an original copy of every email in a separate, immutable store for long-term retention and preservation.

Compliance and e-discovery capabilities provided within Microsoft 365 may be adequate for some organizations, but the “in-place” approach Microsoft takes for long-term email retention and preservation means these capabilities have inherent limitations. They can be complex and expensive to operate and are unlikely to meet the needs of organizations with more demanding compliance and discovery requirements.

Barracuda offers a cloud-based, indexed archive separate from Microsoft 365 that allows for granular retention policies, extensive search, auditing, permissions, legal hold, and export of emails that may be required in e-discovery. Litigation holds preserve email from being tampered with until the litigation hold expires or is removed.

The Barracuda Cloud Archiving Service offers easy-to-use search capabilities, ranging from the most basic search by a user for a misplaced email to advanced Boolean search strategies for an auditor during an e-discovery request.

Microsoft 365 makes email management simpler than on-premises solutions, but you have to get your legacy emails to enjoy the benefits of cloud-based email access. For most organizations, this means a cumbersome process that involves locating countless emails in disparate PST files and migrating them to the cloud.

Scans OneDrive and SharePoint for sensitive information and malicious files. Identify suspicious and malicious files, such as viruses and other types of malware. Find sensitive information, such as credentials, personal data, and financial data, where it exists, and whether it is shared inside or outside the organization.

Allows customers to define their own data classifiers to identify specific information types, such as employee or student IDs, project codenames, or other proprietary information. Enforces user-defined, role-based access control. Advanced encryption capabilities protect document previews from unauthorized access.

Supports all common file types, including Microsoft 365 documents, PDFs, ZIP files, and common image formats. Identifies sensitive information from photos, screen shots, documents scans, etc., thanks to advanced optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities.

Supports automated email notifications for admins and compliance officers when sensitive information is identified. Builds security awareness by notifying users when they store sensitive information in OneDrive or SharePoint. Helps you identify the type of sensitive data immediately. Prevents further proliferation of found data by creating redacted previews.

Full Software-as-a-Service solution — no hardware or software to manage. Takes only minutes to configure and start scanning and adds users automatically. Simple, user-based licensing.