Apache SpamAssassin report to Board for June 2020

SpamAssassin is a mail filter to identify spam. The project provides a framework/engine and regular rule updates that reflect the changing nature of spam email seen in the wild. Updated rules are generated through a combination of hand crafted contributions and automated processing of spam and anonymized processed non-spam that are contributed by volunteers.

Status and health report:

The project activities, including running our rule update infrastructure and our dev and user mailing lists, are continuing smoothly.

SpamAssassin 3.4.4 was released on 28 January, 2020. It was primarily a security release, fixing two CVEs, all then known outstanding open security issues on the project.

Release of SpamAssassin 3.4.5 is imminent, fixing a subsequently reported CVE level security issue.

We intend to return our primary focus to development of version 4.0.0.

We voted to replace use of "blacklist" and "whitelist" with words such as block/deny/allow, after seeing similar action by UK National Cyber Security Centre and Chromium. The changes will be phased to avoid breaking existing installations, with technical details now to be worked out in our normal development process.

Releases:

The last release was Apache SpamAssassin version 3.4.4 on 28 January 2020.

Note that we maintain online rule updates that are continuously updated through a combination of developer contributions and automated processing via our mass-check facility.

Committer/PMC changes:

Most recent new committer:

Paul Stead (pds) 12 September 2018

Most recent new PMC members:

Giovanni Bechis (gbechis) 24 Sep 2018

Henrik Krohns (hege) 25 Sep 2018