UKUUG 2004 Open Source Award

PRESS RELEASE		For Immediate Release		16 May 2004
 	
		UKUUG - Open Source Award 2004

UKUUG (the UK's Unix and Open Systems User Group) has made its 2004 Open
Source Award to Julian Field of the University of Southampton for his work
in creating, developing, and supporting MailScanner, the highly respected
e-mail security system.  The award is made annually to give particular
recognition to the development of free and open source software in the UK.
As well as a GBP 500 cash prize, Julian wins an expenses-paid trip to the
Open Source Convention in Portland, OR, USA, thanks to support from
O'Reilly, organisers of the convention and Gold Sponsors of the Open Source
Award.

MailScanner is a complete e-mail security system designed for use on
UNIX/Linux e-mail gateways.  It protects e-mail client packages such as
Outlook, Outlook Express and Eudora against viruses and can detect almost
all spam.  With e-mail viruses costing businesses millions of pounds every
year and spam accounting for around 60% of all e-mail traffic, MailScanner
is the front line of defence at more than 20,000 sites.

MailScanner has been in continuous development for almost four years.  In
that time it has grown from a simple virus scanner with 1200 lines of code
to a complete email security and anti-spam system of over 30,000 lines.  It
supports the use of any combination of 20 different anti-virus engines to
give the best possible coverage - commercial e-mail systems rely on one or
two.  It incorporates SpamAssassin, widely regarded as the best anti-spam
engine available, and over 800 heuristic spam-detection rules.

Robustness and reliability are of great importance in any software system
that handles e-mail, where legitimate content is often transient and
business-critical.  If an email message is destroyed in transmission, vital
information can vanish without anyone noticing.  Strenuous efforts have
been made in designing and developing MailScanner to ensure that there is
no chance of e-mail messages being lost due to failure of any part of the
software.

MailScanner is distributed free under the GNU General Public License, as
used for a lot of free and open source software.  Julian has adopted this
approach to maintain direct contact with users.  When a new feature is
suggested, he is able to gauge very quickly how useful this would be to the
majority of users. Having full access to the source code, users can and do
suggest fixes when reporting bugs or undesirable behaviour.

MailScanner has been deployed in over 60 countries, and is used for
scanning mail destined for all seven continents (even Antarctica).  It
scans over 5 billion messages per week for numerous government departments,
corporations, non-profit organisations and educational institutions.  It is
used by large ISPs and mobile telephone companies in the UK and Europe,
along with the largest space agency.  It is now downloaded over 20,000
times each month, a total of more than 250,000 downloads.

The judges noted as "Highly Commended" the Enterprise Groupware System
developed by Jake Stride while a student at Newcastle University.  Jake,
now at Warwick University, wins a GBP 100 book prize, also donated by
O'Reilly, and a GBP 100 cash prize.

				***Ends:  506 words***
http://www.mailscanner.info/
http://egs.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
http://www.ukuug.org/osa/


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Notes to Editors:

UKUUG:
The UKUUG (the UK's Unix and open systems User Group) is a non-profit
organisation and technical forum for the advocacy of Unix and Unix-like
operating systems, the promotion of open-source software, and the
advancement of open programming standards and networking protocols.


For further information contact

Jane Morrison, UKUUG Administration
Tel:  01763 273 475
E-mail: office@ukuug.org

or Charles Curran (award manager)
E-mail: charles.curran@ukuug.org

http://www.ukuug.org/pr/OSA2004-winner.pdf		http://www.ukuug.org/osa/

Date: 16 May 2004

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--Charles Curran, on behalf of UKUUG.
	mailto:charles.curran@ukuug.org?subject=UKUUG%20OSA2004