The Apache Software Foundation Announces Release of Apache™ SpamAssassin™ 3.4.0

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Feb 11, 2014, 09:00 ET

Award-winning anti-spam platform gives system administrators the tools they love to keep email free of spam by adding native support for IPv6, improved DNS Blocklist technology and support for massively-scalable Bayesian filtering using the Redis backend

FOREST HILL, Md., Feb. 11, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced a "Valentine's Day gift to the Internet" with the release of Apache™ SpamAssassin™ 3.4.0, the award winning and highly extensible email filtering program and API.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20101020/DC84911LOGO)

Named by eWeek as one of the 11 Apache Technologies that have "changed computing in the last 10 years," SpamAssassin is deployed by hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide who hate spam almost as much as Monty Python[1].

By providing a comprehensive set of features and support for email classification including text-based patterns, Bayesian filtering, DNS Blocklists, checksum filters, sender authentication and automated rule channel updates, SpamAssassin takes a multi-step/tiered approach to classifying email to improve accuracy and decrease the chance of legitimate emails being incorrectly identified as spam.

The project's latest release marks a major milestone more than two years in the making and celebrates a decade with the ASF. "With the release of SpamAssassin 3.4.0, the project continues battling the ever evolving techniques used by spammers with an enterprise-grade release," said Apache SpamAssassin Vice President Kevin A. McGrail. "The number one feature of SpamAssassin is the proven classification scoring framework that allows system administrators to use new ideas to improve email classification, thereby making SpamAssassin timeless."

Apache SpamAssassin is widely deployed at enterprise organizations around the globe, including national, regional and local ISPs, email service providers, Fortune Global 500 companies as well as small and medium-sized businesses, all levels of the education sector, governments, and private individuals.

"SpamAssassin is the centerpiece of our anti spam solution at the ASF," said Joseph Schaefer, Senior System Administrator at the Apache Software Foundation. "We receive roughly half a million connections a day, directed primarily at our mailing lists, and manage to remain almost entirely spam free - thanks SpamAssassin!"

The SpamAssassin project provides daily rule updates to fight spam with the project serving over 1 million unique servers with rule updates in just the first month of 2014.

SpamAssassin has also been the basis for several commercial products and is in use at the core of many commercial offerings of premier email and spam filtering firms including cPanel, the most popular web hosting control panel. cPanel puts SpamAssassin at the fingertips of tens of thousands of system administrators and millions of end-users giving them "the best solution to obliterate unsolicited email on your server and stay compliant with well-known retention standards," said Eric Ellis, Director of Development Operations for cPanel.

"Be Our Valentine"
Apache SpamAssassin reflects intensive support from the anti-spam community including development, testing, and research from scores of knowledgeable users to combat spammers. This release is dedicated to the entire community and their love of fighting spam.

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache SpamAssassin software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache SpamAssassin release notes, source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://spamassassin.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than one hundred and seventy leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Apache SpamAssassin", "SpamAssassin", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(Monty_Python)

SOURCE Apache Software Foundation