Receiving twice as many votes as the closest contender, SpamAssassin
took top honors in the Anti-Spam category of Datamation’s Product of the
Year 2005 Awards.
SpamAssassin, an open source spam filter, easily outdistanced its
competitors in the finalist round of the annual reader-based contest.
Webroot Software, Inc.’s SpySweeper Enterprise had a strong showing as
the runner up. Other finalists included Cloudmark, Inc.’s Cloudmark
Immunity; NetIQ Corp.’s NetIQ MailMarshal SMTP; MessageLabs Ltd.’s
MessageLabs Anti-Spam, and Sophos Inc.’s Sophos PureMessage.
”[SpamAssassin] doesn’t just save us money. It makes us money,” says
Jeremy Howard, CEO of FastMail.FM, an Australia-based email provider with
more than half a million customers. ”We know from direct feedback that
customers are upgrading their accounts because of our SpamAssassin
implementation.”
SpamAssassin is under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation, a
non-profit group that provides organization, along with legal and
financial support for many open source projects. SpamAssassin is used by
corporate, academic and home users as a stand-alone spam filter, but it
also is integrated into other products, such as appliances and email
servers.
The winner in the Anti-Spam category uses techniques such as blacklist
checking, content analysis, header analysis, and collaborate
spam-tracking database checking to weed out spam.
Anti-spam products are increasingly important to the enterprise as
unsolicited bulk email continues to hammer corporate inboxes, mail
servers and IT workers. MessageLabs, an anti-virus and anti-spam company,
reported last year that spam now accounts for nine out of every 10 emails
in the United States. In 2003, spam made up 55 percent of all U.S. email,
but it easily surpassed the 80 percent mark last year.
And that deluge of spam is taking a toll.
Industry analysts largely agree that spam not only distracts workers and
wastes productivity, but it also drives IT managers to use their
already-tightened budget money on extra mail servers and personnel whose
only job is to deal with the flood of unwanted email.
”As an email provider, it’s our job to make sure that our customers get
all the email they want, but only the email they want,” says Howard, who
started using SpamAssassin three years ago. ”Simple message blocking at
our mail server is not an option, since it could block some messages that
our customers wanted to receive, so we had to find a solution that let
customers ‘choose’ what they wanted to block.”
Howard explains that SpamAssassin provides a statistical score, which
customers use to make decisions about which messages should be discarded,
which ones should be filed away and which ones to keep. ”Customers
frequently tell us how happy they are now that their inboxes contain less
spam, without throwing away any of the messages that they want to
receive,” he adds.
Daniel Quinlan, vice president of Apache SpamAssassin, says their product
stands out because it’s a wide-spectrum solution.
”It uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam,”
says Quinlan. ”It makes it hard for spammers to identify any one single
thing they can change in their email to get around the filter… Plus,
it’s free software, so obviously that’s attractive.”
Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
December 16, 2020
AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
December 11, 2020
Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020
Datamation is the leading industry resource for B2B data professionals and technology buyers. Datamation's focus is on providing insight into the latest trends and innovation in AI, data security, big data, and more, along with in-depth product recommendations and comparisons. More than 1.7M users gain insight and guidance from Datamation every year.
Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on Datamation and our other data and technology-focused platforms.
Advertise with Us
Property of TechnologyAdvice.
© 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this
site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives
compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products
appear on this site including, for example, the order in which
they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies
or all types of products available in the marketplace.