Leading Open Source Email Filtering Package Offers First Major Code Release Since 2007

FOREST HILL, MD – 26 January, 2010 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) today announced the release of Apache SpamAssassin 3.3.0, the first major code release from the Apache SpamAssassin Project since May 2007. Apache SpamAssassin v3.3.0 marks the Project's 4th major (and 24th overall release) since the SpamAssassin Project joined the ASF in December 2003.

Apache SpamAssassin is an award winning, mature, wide-spectrum, extensible email filtering package deployed by hundreds of thousands of organizations world-wide.

"Apache SpamAssassin is the leading Open Source email spam filtering software package that is in use by national, regional and local ISPs, email service providers, Fortune Global 500 companies, small to enterprise businesses, all levels of the education sector, governments and private individuals," said Daryl C. W. O'Shea, Chair of the Apache SpamAssassin Project Management Committee (PMC) and Information Technology Coordinator at the Township of Tay in Ontario, Canada. "SpamAssassin is also in use at the core of many commercial offerings of premier email and spam filtering firms: with its automatic update feature, sa-update, SpamAssassin now not only saves the time of end-users, it saves the time of email administrators, further increasing the software's ROI. We're very proud that SpamAssassin has become the standard for extensible and effective spam filtering software."

Apache SpamAssassin 3.3.0 represents a major shift in how SpamAssassin rules (the actual patterns that help to identify spam) are updated. Starting with version 3.3.0, rules are now separate from the core product and are instead downloaded using "sa-update", SpamAssassin's automatic update software. This method was optional with the 3.2.x series of releases and has proven to be very popular.

SpamAssassin provides a comprehensive set of features and support for methods and standards such as text based patterns, bayesian scoring, DNS based black and white lists, DKIM and SPF sender authentication, and email signature clearing houses. The software utilizes a principle of identifying multiple reasons for classifying an email as spam to improve accuracy and decrease the chance of legitimate emails being incorrectly identified as spam.

Les Tutkaluke, President of netGUARD Solutions said, "NetGUARD Solutions has been utilizing SpamAssassin for 8 years starting with version 1.0. The advanced e-mail scanning functions within the processing engines of netGUARD Solutions manages in excess of 75 million messages per day for our vast customer subscriber base. SpamAssassin is an integral and admirable addition to our filtering system and is a significant part of the accurate identification of unwanted e-mail. The success of netGUARD Solutions is directly tied to SpamAssassin and the solid programming within it."

"Over the past 365 days, SpamAssassin has blocked 516,975 unsolicited junk mails while letting through 85,032 clean ones. Without SpamAssassin email would simply be unusable. It is an essential component to our business activities," said Jean-Yves Avenard, SysAdmin at Hydrix Pty Ltd, Australia.

Released under the Apache Software Licence v2.0, Apache SpamAssassin 3.3.0 can be downloaded at http://spamassassin.apache.org/; additional user reviews and industry testimonials are available at http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/Testimonials

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 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," nearly 300 individual Members and 2,000 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 funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Progress Software, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo! For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

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