To all concerned, I apologize for the apparent maligning of SpamAssassin in my recent article in InfoWorld. In my original article, I stated that I used the 2.44 release of SpamAssassin for two reasons - because it was the version shipping with the latest release of Red Hat 9 and because it would illustrate how much the state of the art has changed in the last year or two. This explanation was condensed in the finished article by copy editors, which is beyond my control. This will be covered in the letters to the editor section of InfoWorld so the rest of the world will know that I did not deliberately use an old version of SA to show it in a bad light against commercial products. I plan to review the current version in an upcoming article, and I am sure that it will perform better.
Regarding some of the other comments that have been made, some of you have said that SA is not hard to install, taking no more than an hour or two to download, install, configure and begin using. That is consistent with the 10 times longer number I used, because the other installation and configuration times were all around 5-10 minutes. You have said that an experienced Linux administrator doesn't find SA difficult to install or configure, and that additional functionality such as user-accessible white lists can be added, either through additional open source software or by writing scripts or programming to extend the functionality of SA. That's true, but not really relevant, unless there is a distribution that contains all of those features.
You have also said that I should have taken into account the fact that it doesn't cost anything before making statements about it being harder to install, configure and manage than the commercial products. SA does cost - but in an administrator's time rather than money, which I did say in the article.
The same is true of support - while you may get faster or better support through this group than you get with commercial software, there's no guarantee that you'll get any support at all - and most organizations will find that hard to live with.
So, when I review the latest version of SA, you can expect performance to be better, but I will still look closely at installation, administration, updates, maintenance, reporting, granularity of management, and end-user features for SA, just as I will for any other anti-spam packages I review.
Again, my apologies for creating a story that distressed so many of you. I do try to create balanced reviews that reflect the pros and cons of all the products reviewed.
Thanks,
Logan G. Harbaugh
530 222-1164
693 Reddington Drive
Redding, CA 96003
www.lharba.com
