Cole was initially highly skeptical of the core mechanisms of SpamAssassin on both ethical and technical grounds. In an interview with the LinuxSecurity team, Bill Cole explains that he was impressed by the project’s rapid evolution, and that his outlook on the project changed drastically as he got involved. Support and critique provided by the open source community drove rapid innovation and notable improvements during the project’s initial years.
Apache spamassassin software#
In the summer of 2004, Spamassassin became an Apache Software Foundation project and was officially renamed Apache SpamAssassin. Bill Cole, one of the lead developers involved in the SpamAssassin project, recalls, “2001 was a low point in the ‘arms race’ against spam and new tools were needed.” Engineers and developers saw potential in the SpamAssassin project and began to get involved. At the time, spam email was becoming increasingly problematic and no real tools existed to effectively combat it.
Apache spamassassin code#
Mason rewrote all of Jeftovic’s code and uploaded the rewritten codebase to SourceForge on April 20, 2001. SpamAssassin was created by Justin Mason, a software engineer who had maintained a number of patches against an earlier program named x by Mark Jeftovic. The History of SpamAssassin: How an Ingenious Idea Evolved into a World-Renowned Anti-Spam Platform McGrail is also Director of Business Growth at and serves as a Top Contributor, Developer Expert and Evangelist for Google Workspace. He is still involved with the project to this day. Kevin McGrail, a cyber security and privacy expert and one of the lead developers for the SpamAssassin project since 1996, also considers SpamAssassin an open source success story, stating in a recent conversation with the LinuxSecurity team, “It protects millions of users every day and provides the inspiration if not the foundation of numerous commercial solutions for battling spammers.” Over the years McGrail has served as a developer, administrator, project chair and release manager for the SpamAssassin project. Along the way, they incorporated enterprise functionality into the platform they had created as a means to solve real-world issues. The team demonstrated innovation, leadership and perseverance in the face of both success and adversity. The project is the epitome of an open source success story: expert engineers and developers volunteered their time to combat the unsolicited email problem. SpamAssassin, a renowned and respected open-source anti-spam platform, provides a secure, reliable framework upon which companies can build highly effective spam filtering and email security solutions.
Small & Medium Business Email Protection.