This is not a formal announcement, but an invitation to a broader users community to try the release candidate of the coming release of Apache SpamAssassin version 3.4.0 .
Preliminary release notes and a link to the package was published in a posting to the d...@spamassassin.apache.org mailing list: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.spam.spamassassin.devel/69001 The "call for votes" in the message only applies to project members, but feedback from wider audience of testers is very much welcome. The Mail-SpamAssassin-3.4.0-rc2 package is available at: http://people.apache.org/~kmcgrail/devel/ Rules may be downloaded from the same location, but this is rarely necessary. A normal procedure is to install the software (the usual CPAN installation procedure should suffice, but this very much depends on a platform of choice), then run a 'sa-update' command, which will find and download appropriate rules to a version-specific directory. Except for some minor details, the 3.4.0 is compatible with 3.3.2 in its API and in database formats (but uses a separate directory to store rules), so it should be possible to switch back and forth between both versions in a test environment, if a need arises. Still, due diligence is appropriate: have your backups ready before starting to play with the new software, especially in a production environment. Nevertheless, this version has been in production use at several sites for months, so it should be at least as good as 3.3.2 . It is expected that the final release will follow shortly, so a quick response would be appreciated. Mark
