Apache SpamAssassin 4.0 Released With Many Improvements For Fighting Spam

After years of work the Apache project SpamAssassin has released its much-improved SpamAssassin 4.0 open-source software.

SpamAssassin 4.0 is available today for helping combat spam on mail servers with its advanced mail filtering capabilities. With Apache SpamAssassin 4.0 there is a wide variety of improvements and new features that have been built up over the past several years as a rather major upgrade over the prior SpamAssassin 3.4 series.

Some of the SpamAssassin 4.0 highlights include:

- SpamAssassin 4.0 has full Unicode support with native UTF-8 handling for easily blocking spam now in different languages.

- Better geo-localization support.

- Bayes improvements particularly around non-English emails and common words.

- SSL client certificate support has been improved.

- A plugin to check if emails match the DMARC policy after parsing the DKIM and SPF results.

- A plugin capable of decoding shortened URLs from a variety of URL shortening services. The plugin will then figure out the real URL from supported shortening services to check for spam-related matches.

- The ExtractText plug-in that allows for calling external software to extract text from email attachments, such as for handling PDF or Microsoft Office documents, etc. Tesseract OCR can even be used for analyzing text found on images.

- A plug-in to check if an email contains a Microsoft Office document attachment containing a macro, as it could potentially be a malicious macro.

- Optimizations for greater efficiency around DNS queries being done asynchronously now, DCC checks can use dccifd asynchronously for greater throughput, and other async enhancements.

- Many other bug fixes, optimizations, configuration options, and more.

Downloads and more details on SpamAssassin 4.0 via spamassassin.apache.org.