Latest version of award-winning Open Source anti-spam platform features top level domain updating, blocklist improvements, better SPF support to help identify spoofed emails, and Redis support for massively-scalable Bayesian installations.

Forest Hill, MD —04 May 2015— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the availability of Apache™ SpamAssassin™ v3.4.1, the latest version of the popular anti-spam platform.

Apache SpamAssassin is the #1 enterprise Open Source anti-spam platform that provides system administrators a filter to classify email and block "spam" (unsolicited bulk email).  It uses a robust scoring framework and plug-ins to integrate a wide range of advanced heuristic and statistical analysis tests on email headers and body text.

"With the release of SpamAssassin 3.4.1, I particularly love that we're delivering new top level domains through rule updates," said Apache SpamAssassin Vice President Kevin A. McGrail. "With this latest release, we continue to deliver on our promise to separate the rules from the software, allowing administrators to react faster, stop more spammers and lower administrative overhead."

SpamAssassin v3.4.1 represents more than a year of development and nearly 500 tweaks, changes, upgrades and bug fixes over the previous release.  Highlights include: 

  • improved automation to help combat spammers that are abusing new top level domains; 
  • tweaks to the SPF support to block more spoofed emails; 
  • increased character set normalization to make rules easier to develop and stop spammers from using alternate character sets to bypass tests; 
  • continued refinement to the native IPv6 support; and 
  • improved Bayesian classification with better debugging and attachment hashing.

A complete overview of new enhancements can be found in the project release notes at https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/spamassassin/tags/spamassassin_release_3_4_1/Changes

SpamAssassin was named by eWeek as one of the 11 Apache Technologies that have changed computing in the last 10 years, and can be used on Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is deployed by hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide, including national, regional and local ISPs; email service providers; Fortune Global 500 companies; small and medium-sized businesses; all levels of the education sector; governments; and private individuals.

Internet security company Guardian Digital utilizes the best-of-breed technology available in SpamAssassin to build enterprise security solutions for some of the largest companies in the world. "Using Apache SpamAssassin as a framework, our email protection system helps the most successful organizations protect their data from all forms of email attacks," stated Dave Wreski, President and CEO of Guardian Digital.

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 350 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 500 individual Members and 4,500 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 Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Cerner, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ and follow https://twitter.com/TheASF

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