Announcing OpenEFA – Continuing the Legacy of the eFa-Project

[barbours]

Dear eFa Community,
We’re proud to introduce OpenEFA, a modern continuation of the original eFa-Project—built on the solid foundation laid by Shawn Iverson, whose work brought intelligent and accessible email filtering to thousands of organizations.

OpenEFA is a community-driven effort to preserve and advance the original mission of eFa. Our focus is on:
Maintaining compatibility with the original project
Offering updated appliance builds and hosted solutions
Integrating modern NLP tools such as SpaCy for advanced filtering and analysis
Staying true to the open-source, security-first values that made eFa great

Our goal is to honor Shawn’s work while evolving the platform to meet today’s challenges. You can learn more, contribute, or follow development at:

Website: https://openefa.com | https://openefa.org
GitHub: https://github.com/openefaadmin/eFa5

If you’ve been part of the eFa community—whether as a user, contributor, or fan—we’d love for you to join us in shaping the future of OpenEFA.

Sincerely,
The OpenEFA Team

[activateit]

Nothing to see here. No real useful information, nothing to even look at, a single page on the site just collecting potential user data.

Nothing done on github except for the fork.

When you actually have a product, is when an announcement should be made about the product.

[barbours]

Agreed. Might have gotten a little bit ahead of myself. That being said, I have done a lot of work on the natural language processing and have integrated it into the efa. So, stay tuned. it is coming soon.

[barbours]

Here is the latest taken from my post on slack.
I'm actively working on a one-click interactive install script for my SpaCy-based email filtering engine, currently integrated with eFa version 5. It's already running smoothly alongside my mail filter and leveraging MariaDB/MySQL.
Right now, I'm running several modules, including:
PythonDNS enhancement
Phishing detection
Email sentiment analysis
Thread awareness
Language detection
Marketing classification
Obfuscation detection
Business Email Compromise (BEC) module
Each module targets a different angle of email analysis—ranging from content and security evaluation to scam detection, language handling, and spam classification. Together, they form a powerful, modular system that analyzes nearly every aspect of an email.
I'm still deciding which core modules to include by default. Documentation is underway, and the install script is coming along—but as you can imagine, tying it all into eFa's scoring and quarantine logic adds complexity. A single change can influence whether an email is passed, flagged, or quarantined.
That said, it's been a rewarding challenge. This setup gives me far more flexibility and modern detection options while still leaning on the great foundation eFa5 provides. The combination of SpaCy and eFa is turning out to be seriously powerful.
If you're working on something similar or facing unique spam/security challenges, I'd love to connect and hear what you'd like to see in a system like this. For me, this is where I spend most of my time fighting spam—and the results have been worth it so far.
The project is called openSpacy-Guardian, and the integration with eFa is already proving very effective. Looking forward to where it goes next.