The future of efa

[isene]

When efa rides into the sunset, what alternatives exist? Other products, other maintainer(s), forking, ...?

I am the OPs manager for a company relying on efa for our customer services. We need a solid future for our products with something like efa in place and also with expertise we could rely on.

What would be our options? Anyone here I could have a grounded discussion with?

[ITW_Markus]

Out only valid pay solution would be switchung to hornetsecurity.
Or alternative keeping efa secure alive for ourself (no fork -> just os/packages/funtions/configs).

[barbours]

I have been using primarily opensource software for a long long time and plan to continue. I the EFA community has some great people, engineers, and a great base that should be continued. It will be difficult and or some pretty difficult roads ahead with out Shawn, but I am certainly up for the challenge.

I have asked Shawn in a private message about some of the details about who is managing things and how best to keep this going. I certainly have some ideas and would support putting together a community meeting to discuss it with those interested. So, lets talk...

[darky83]

Proxmox Mail Gateway is one alternative that could serve as a suitable replacement.

You may have seen the recent announcement — if there are members of the community who are interested in continuing the EFA Project, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Just one word of advice: don’t make the mistake of relying on a single person. I originally built this project as a successor to the now-defunct ESVA Project, and after years of working on it, I was fortunate that Shawn stepped in to take over the main development. At that point, it had become too much to maintain alongside a full-time job and family.

With Shawn stepping away, I had every intention of picking things back up again, but the reality is — I simply haven’t had the time.

There were big goals on the roadmap — containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), multi-server support, high availability — but they remained on the to-do list.

One of the challenges of this project is that I always wanted it to remain free and open for everyone and to 'just work'. Yes, we had a donation page, but after all these years, it hasn’t even come close to covering the hosting costs.

I have made this a top post so discussions can start here, and again if there are people really interested please reach out.

[woundride]

Hello,

I've worked with EFA in a previous job. EFA have been a really great solution, better than some commercial solutions and that's a real pleasure to worked with it.
Still thanks for your work, your help and your kindness during all this years shawniverson and darky83 !
Even if I've a news job today and don't use EFA since 5 years ago, the end of this project is a sad news for me :/
I understand and respect your decision, thank you again and again for all you've done my friends !

Kind regards,

Charles

[darky83]

Hi Charles,

Thank you so much for your kind words — they truly mean a lot.

We're grateful for your support, both back then and now, even after all this time. It's never easy to say goodbye to something we've poured so much into, but messages like yours make it clear that the effort was worth it.

Thanks again for being part of the journey — and we wish you all the best in your current role and beyond.

[Stinger]

Hi,
I’d just like to add my words of thanks. efa has been a rock for me since it's inception. You should be very proud of what you have achieved. I know from other projects I work on, balancing work, family and volunteering is no easy task. You both have my respect.
All the very best
Chris

[Stuart]

No other message filtering gateway is as good as the EFA project.

Thank you to those who committed their time to develop this.

Thank you to anyone that answered questions and help troubleshoot issues.

[barbours]

I echo all of the comments about the work over the years. It has been wonderful. I have some resources, a fair amount of hosting services, and ample servers, and platform to keep things moving forward. I am working on a release of OpenEFA (fork of efa-project v5) and have added some basic modifications already that are making my life and my customers email lives better. If anybody is interested in working with me, please reach out. You can find the latest on https://openefa.com and the contact page will get to me.

I am working on this in two stages. Stage one will be OpenSpacy, and it is a appliance that provides a lot of dynamic, modern learning, filtering, and security protection. Right now, it provides 20 modules of things that are not built into EFA. After openspacy analyzes and scores the incoming mail, it forwards it to EFA for final disposition, quarantine, etc. I will release this in about 25 days, just working out the install method.

Eventually, I want to combine OpenSpacy and the OpenEFA and continue the legacy of the efa-project. That will take a fair amount of work, so for now it will be a two server or two VM solution. Arguments can be made that a two server solution provide some benefit, but in the end, we all already have to many servers to handle, so I see it as eventually going to a one server solution.

Right now, OpenSpacy is running on Ubuntu 22.04, but I feel it is pretty agnostic. More to come. Reach out if interested in installing and running a pre-release version of OpenSpacy. sb

[barbours]

Proxmox Mail Gateway is one alternative that could serve as a suitable replacement.

You may have seen the recent announcement — if there are members of the community who are interested in continuing the EFA Project, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Just one word of advice: don’t make the mistake of relying on a single person. I originally built this project as a successor to the now-defunct ESVA Project, and after years of working on it, I was fortunate that Shawn stepped in to take over the main development. At that point, it had become too much to maintain alongside a full-time job and family.

With Shawn stepping away, I had every intention of picking things back up again, but the reality is — I simply haven’t had the time.

There were big goals on the roadmap — containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), multi-server support, high availability — but they remained on the to-do list.

One of the challenges of this project is that I always wanted it to remain free and open for everyone and to 'just work'. Yes, we had a donation page, but after all these years, it hasn’t even come close to covering the hosting costs.

I have made this a top post so discussions can start here, and again if there are people really interested please reach out.

I am in love with proxmox, but didn't think the proxmail is a good replacement for EFA, especially if it is a multi domain situation. I tried it on a couple of domains that I have and I didn't see the full functionality that comes with efa.. I have a large Proxmox setup, so pretty versed in it. Just didn't like proxmail as a replacement.