In early December I was nominated and elected to become a member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). I’ve been contributing to SpamAssassin, an Apache project, since just after the release of 3.0.0 in October 2004 (and a committer since March of 2005). I’ve been using and working on SpamAssassin since Justin Mason’s first release back around 2001. I guess, so far, I’ve failed to do more harm than good and elected a member as punishment. 
January 26th, 2008
We released Apache SpamAssassin 3.2.4 on Monday. It fixes a number of significant bugs in sa-compile and includes some improvements to the async DNS code. Also included are fixes for problems with non-SQL based user configs and bayes databases. If you use either you may benefit from these fixes, although I recommend that you use SQL for both.
There have been reports that 3.2.4 is faster than previous 3.2 versions. I haven’t benchmarked it but I would guess that, while individual messages may be processed faster, overall message throughput may only improve a little.
You can download SpamAssassin here.
January 13th, 2008
Cool. I just noticed today that you can configure Thunderbird to trust SpamAssassin’s “junk mail headers” (ie. the X-Spam-* headers that SA adds by default). Apparently it’s done this for a while as the wiki page that describes the feature was last edited in March 2006. I’m assuming there’s a downside though, as I don’t suspect that there’s anything to prevent Thunderbird from trusting forged SA headers added by bad dudes.
January 11th, 2008
