SpamAssassin now International, Embraces DMARC
The Apache project SpamAssassin is celebrating a major milestone with the release of version 4.0 of their open-source software. The news was revealed by Kevin A. Mcgrail, 2023 keynote speaker for Inbox Expo, and Chair Emiritus of Apache SpamAssassin. The news has been highly anticipated by users of the software for some time. SpamAssassin is a free and open-source mail filter that helps to detect unsolicited bulk email through a variety of different methods to identify and filter out unwanted emails, including header analysis, text analysis, Bayesian filtering, DNS blocklists, and more.
These updates provide users with an enhanced experience when it comes to protecting their inboxes from unwanted emails while also providing them with more control over how their messages are handled. It provides mail servers with advanced mail filtering capabilities and is a major upgrade from the prior 3.4 series, including international language capabilities and DMARC scoring.
SpamAssassin is an open-source anti-spam tool developed by the Apache Software Foundation.
It is designed to be highly effective against spam and can be embedded in numerous products and services. SpamAssassin can be integrated with email servers such as qmail and Postfix to provide an extra layer of protection from spam. It can also be used to filter messages as they enter a mail server’s inbox or outgoing mail queue. Additionally, it can be used on webmail systems like Horde or SquirrelMail to provide users with a way to manage their own spam filters. Many ESP, Mailbox Providers and ISP’s use SpamAssassin as part of their overall anti-spam solution.
Among the new features of SpamAssassin 4.0 are full Unicode support with native UTF-8 handling, better geo-localization support, Bayes improvements for non-English emails and common words, SSL client certificate support, a plugin to check if emails match the DMARC policy after parsing the DKIM and SPF results, a plugin capable of decoding shortened URLs from different services and finding real URLs to check for spam matches, an ExtractText plug-in that allows for external software to extract text from email attachments such as PDFs or Microsoft Office documents, Tesseract OCR to analyze images in attachments, a plug-in to check if an email contains a malicious macro in Microsoft Office documents and many other optimizations and bug fixes.
SpamAssassin 4.0 aims to help users combat spam more effectively with its new features and improved efficiency. The Apache project is committed to providing users with a reliable and effective spam protection solution that can keep up with the changing landscape of email security. With the release of version 4.0 of SpamAssassin, they have delivered on this commitment.
