The OSS community finally got wind of this…

I ranted about <a href=http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/07/18/28FEspamassassin_1.html>this poorly written article</a>. It compares an obsolete version of Spamassassin released in February 2003 to the latest commercial anti-spam offerings. The review made me wonder if the reviewer was short on time, unable to use a text editor to edit a configuration file or deliberately favoring commercial vendors?

Several comments didn’t make sense - he didn’t use a control group of messages, instead used different batches of messages for each product. He claimed that SpamAssassin took 10 times longer to configure than the others, his article leads me to believe he installed SA from the Red Hat RPM and used the default configuration. The time involved would be the time to type in one command to add the RPM to his system.

The mail admins I know have set up SpamAssassin and not had any trouble with configuration. Admittedly, we’re all mail admins and not “technical” journalists - maybe the author merely doesn’t understand his target audience?

<a href=http://www.slashdot.org>Slashdot</a> finally got wind of this. <a href=http://slashdot.org/articles/03/11/25/1314226.shtml?tid=126&tid=163>http://slashdot.org/articles/03/11/25/1314226.shtml?tid=126&tid=163</a>.

The irony is that Kevin Railsback, their test manager, <a href=http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/07/18/28FEspamassassin_1.html?s=feature>reviewed SpamAssassin favorably</a>, and that InfoWorld uses SpamAssassin for their daily spam-filtering!

The reviewer’s official response is <a href=http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=3525145&forum_id=1981>here</a>.