Dear DSPAM Users,
When 3.8.0 was released, I mentioned that we were working on
announcing some news relating to the DSPAM project and its recent
delay in development. As many of you are painfully aware, there was a
significant delay in the development of the project last year. In
September 2005, I accepted a position as Research Scientist with
CipherTrust, Inc., who has recently been acquired by Secure Computing
Corporation (NASD:SCUR) where I have been designing the next
generation of anti-spam, anti-phishing, and other intelligent
technologies. Secure Computing is an avid supporter of DSPAM, and in
fact we have incorporated it into some of our solutions including our
IronMail with Advanced Compliance and IronNet Compliance products,
and use it internally for several different applications. While I
have been given the freedom to continue work on DSPAM, I've found
myself very busy with both work and family, and unable to give it the
attention it has deserved. A year-long agonizing wait to move to the
Boston area has also put a strain on my life.
With all of this going on, I concluded that the project had grown to
a point where it would take others - with enough free time - to
continue work on the project and bring DSPAM higher as a widely
accepted enterprise-class solution. I decided that it would be in the
best interest of the project to entrust it to someone with the
technical knowhow and dedication to reach these goals. Many of you
are aware of my work in the past with Sensory Networks in developing
a hardware-accelerated version of DSPAM (capable of supporting multi-
megabit speeds in large carrier environments). I've spent a
considerable amount of time with SN's team over the past several
years and when we initially discussed working together, they had
shown to be very excited and motivated about the project. After
careful consideration and many discussions at length, I decided to
allow Sensory Networks to acquire the rights to the project, and
continue development on it with their manpower. SN has displayed a
strong commitment to the open source community and has been working
closely with other leading projects such as Snort, Clam Antivirus,
and SpamAssassin. They assured me that the project will remain open-
source and available to all, and at the same time the project will
receive exposure in commercial environments it has not seen before,
as many of you have been asking for. We've now completed the
acquisition for the project, and I'd like to encourage you to support
them in helping them move forward as it grows into new areas.
All annual support agreements I have in place will continue to be
serviced through myself, and not Sensory Networks, so please continue
to contact me for support if you have such an agreement in place (or
would like to). I'm certainly not going anywhere, and will continue
running DSPAM on my own personal systems, as well as fully supporting
it to my current and future clients.
Sensory Networks' DSPAM project contact may be contacted at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] You will likely be hearing from them in
the future with new information related to the project. If you're on
file as a DSPAM contributor and have provided a copyright release,
you will want to contact them with any pending patch submissions.
Please feel free to contact me as well if you have any questions or
concerns. I still feel very strongly about the project and care about
its success, so I'm sure you'll be seeing me around.
For those of you who don't know, DSPAM began as a hobby to filter
mail for my local church. Within a few years, it surprisingly turned
into a very popular and powerful anti-spam suite for many large-scale
networks. It is approaching the top 100 projects on Freshmeat and
protects millions upon millions of mailboxes. Out of these efforts
have come a significant undertaking, as well as many doors opened for
me personally including a book and a full-time career in machine-
learning development. For this I have to thank all who have helped
support and promote the project. Thanks so much for helping to make
DSPAM a successful project and giving me something to enjoy in my
spare time all these years. Developing this project has been one of
my best experiences, and I look forward to where it's going to go in
the future.
Jonathan
