The SpamTagger project is being led by the former head of development for the MailCleaner® antispam gateway. Development of that project has been discontinued by Alinto and so we will attempt to resume support as an entirely community-maintained project. It is still unclear whether this will be possible within the MailCleaner organization, or if a fork will need to be operated by the SpamTagger organization. We will seek to maintain compatibility with MailCleaner®, while modernizing and fixing bugs.
The primary task at this time is to complete a migration to a new Debian base. The current intention is to target Debian Trixie, which should become the stable release in summer 2025. In the meantime, bug fixes will continue to be merged to the main branch.
No significant new features are expected for MailCleaner after the Debian migration, except where they can be easily ported from the core SpamTagger project. We would like to keep it as stable as possible for users who just want it to keep working as is, but additional contributions from the community will certainly be considered.
A new SpamTagger solution will draw much of it's inspiration from MailCleaner® and should provide the ability to have more active development on features focused on increasing spam filtering quality while requiring fewer development resources. See the placeholder repository for more details on what SpamTagger seeks to accomplish.
A spam filter is nothing without good rules and training data. Aside from providing support, the primary value proposition of MailCleaner® Enterprise Edition was that it provided premium data feeds. SpamTagger will seek to find new ways to provide similar data feeds and other tools which can be integrated into any filtering environment.
This will include community sourced SpamC rules, tools for hybrid local and shared bayes training, and other projects.
Your ideas, concerns and assistance are welcome!
If you have immediate concerns about a bug in any project, you are encouraged to use the Issues tab for that project's GitHub repository.
If you have questions or ideas that you would like to discuss with other users, you are encouraged to use the Discussion tab for that project.
SpamTagger will seek to maintain currated lists of SpamC rules which can be individually opted in to. These will be sourced from users globally and we would encourage you to share any rules that you find success with. Documentation to come...
The Wiki tab for each projects will serve as the official documentation for each project. These allow for community contributions and we would welcome improvements. If you ever encounter something that you wish was spelled out a little bit better, it is very likely that others feel the same way. Feel free to discuss it with others to make sure you understand, then add that knowledge to the Wiki.
If you have intermediate knowledge of programming (and generally a passing knowledge of Perl), you can take a look at Issues across our various repositories to find something you feel capable of fixing. Just go for it! We'll be happy to provide help!
If there is a new feature that you would like to see in any project, you are encouraged to first discuss with the community to ensure that you work in the right direction before wasting any time. When you have a good idea of what you want to contribute, please open an Issue with a [Feature] tag in the subject to state your goals and track your progress. You can then open a Pull Request and mention the Issue number when your work is ready for review.
