article: SpamAssassin Takes Top Anti-Spam Honors

[Daniel Quinlan <qu...@pathname.com>]

I'm surprised nobody posted this yet!

It's nice when a company will actually talk to the media about their use
of open source software.  :-)

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/secu/article.php/3481971

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SpamAssassin Takes Top Anti-Spam Honors
February 9, 2005
By Sharon Gaudin

Receiving twice as many votes as the closest contender, SpamAssassin
took top honors in the Anti-Spam category of Datamation's Product of the
Year 2005 Awards.

SpamAssassin, an open source spam filter, easily outdistanced its
competitors in the finalist round of the annual reader-based
contest. Webroot Software, Inc.'s SpySweeper Enterprise had a strong
showing as the runner up. Other finalists included Cloudmark, Inc.'s
Cloudmark Immunity; NetIQ Corp.'s NetIQ MailMarshal SMTP; MessageLabs
Ltd.'s MessageLabs Anti-Spam, and Sophos Inc.'s Sophos PureMessage.

''[SpamAssassin] doesn't just save us money. It makes us money,'' says
Jeremy Howard, CEO of FastMail.FM, an Australia-based email provider
with more than half a million customers. ''We know from direct feedback
that customers are upgrading their accounts because of our SpamAssassin
implementation.''

SpamAssassin is under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation, a
non-profit group that provides organization, along with legal and
financial support for many open source projects. SpamAssassin is used by
corporate, academic and home users as a stand-alone spam filter, but it
also is integrated into other products, such as appliances and email
servers.

The winner in the Anti-Spam category uses techniques such as blacklist
checking, content analysis, header analysis, and collaborate
spam-tracking database checking to weed out spam.

Anti-spam products are increasingly important to the enterprise as
unsolicited bulk email continues to hammer corporate inboxes, mail
servers and IT workers. MessageLabs, an anti-virus and anti-spam
company, reported last year that spam now accounts for nine out of every
10 emails in the United States. In 2003, spam made up 55 percent of all
U.S. email, but it easily surpassed the 80 percent mark last year.

And that deluge of spam is taking a toll.

Industry analysts largely agree that spam not only distracts workers and
wastes productivity, but it also drives IT managers to use their
already-tightened budget money on extra mail servers and personnel whose
only job is to deal with the flood of unwanted email.

''As an email provider, it's our job to make sure that our customers get
all the email they want, but only the email they want,'' says Howard,
who started using SpamAssassin three years ago. ''Simple message
blocking at our mail server is not an option, since it could block some
messages that our customers wanted to receive, so we had to find a
solution that let customers 'choose' what they wanted to block.''

Howard explains that SpamAssassin provides a statistical score, which
customers use to make decisions about which messages should be
discarded, which ones should be filed away and which ones to
keep. ''Customers frequently tell us how happy they are now that their
inboxes contain less spam, without throwing away any of the messages
that they want to receive,'' he adds.

Daniel Quinlan, vice president of Apache SpamAssassin, says their
product stands out because it's a wide-spectrum solution.

''It uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam,''
says Quinlan. ''It makes it hard for spammers to identify any one single
thing they can change in their email to get around the filter... Plus,
it's free software, so obviously that's attractive.''

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-- 
Daniel Quinlan
http://www.pathname.com/~quinlan/

Sudden problem with SA/Amavis/Postfix

[Amnon <am...@deltaforce.net>]

Running Fedora core 3, SA 3.something, P4 with 1gig. ram.

Thursday afternoon, I noticed that the processor on the mail server is working 
overtime.  Top shows 0.0 idle cpu, everything is slow to a crawl.

To make a long story short, it looks like it has to do with Bayes.  Every time I 
would forward a spam to sa-learn, it will bring the system to a crawl, sa-learn 
will show in 'top' for about 30 seconds, idle will be 0.0, and then it will clear 
and come up right away.  Moved the bayes file to another folder and let it start 
building new ones.  No difference.  If it is doing it during the weekend when 
things are slow, I can imagine what will happen on Monday :-(.

Any thoughts?  Did anybody seen this before?

Thanks.


Shalom Ya'll
Amnon Nissan

Deltaforce
919-852-2121
http://www.deltaforce.net

Host, Computers 2K4
on 850 The Buzz  (AM 850) in Raleigh NC
Sundays 8-10am
http://www.850thebuzz.com/compute.html

MV stuff are at:
  http://www.deltaforce.net/deuce/
  http://www.ncmvpa.com

Re: article: SpamAssassin Takes Top Anti-Spam Honors

[Jeff Chan <je...@surbl.org>]

On Saturday, February 12, 2005, 7:47:33 PM, Daniel Quinlan wrote:
> I'm surprised nobody posted this yet!

> It's nice when a company will actually talk to the media about their use
> of open source software.  :-)

> http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/secu/article.php/3481971

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

> SpamAssassin Takes Top Anti-Spam Honors
> February 9, 2005
> By Sharon Gaudin

> Receiving twice as many votes as the closest contender, SpamAssassin
> took top honors in the Anti-Spam category of Datamation's Product of the
> Year 2005 Awards.

Congrats SpamAssassin folks!

Jeff C.
-- 
Jeff Chan
mailto:jeffc@surbl.org
http://www.surbl.org/