His company, DeerSoft, was acquired by Network Associates (recently renamed McAfee) at the end of 2002. While SpamAssassin was an open-source project, DeerSoft specialised in creating proprietary extensions to the software to make it easier to manage. Network Associates snapped up the company, Mason and his fellow engineers along with it.
He says the vendors are actually coming up with products that are useful, but concedes you can only go so far. "There are limitations as to how accurate you can get," he admits.
Perhaps of most concern is the number messages tagged as spam that are in fact legitimate. The current rates of what is cutely referred to as "collateral damage" or "false positives" are running at around 0.5 percent in the present generation of Network Associates products, Mason claims.
