Apache SpamAssassin report to Board for March 2021
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.
Previous reports to the Board have described the release of SpamAssassin 3.4.5 as "imminent", fixing a CVE obtained in February, 2020. That should have triggered a process resulting in a release with 90 days. The last publicly released build for it was 3.4.5 Pre-Release 1 built on June 21, 2020. Development continued after that, without a formal release yet. We recognize that this has been unacceptable. There do not appear to be any issues blocking the release at this time. We intend to run the release process as soon as possible on the current 3.4 branch. After that we will look at how to modify our development and release processes to better conform to modern CI practices, further automate releases, and add time targets to our process steps.
We intend to return our primary focus to development of version 4.0.0 once 3.4.5 is released.
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