Justin Mason

Last updated

Justin Mason
Born
Ireland
OccupationSoftware engineer
Known for Apache SpamAssassin
Website https://jmason.org

Justin Mason is an Irish software developer who is known for his work on Apache SpamAssassin and other open-source software.

Contents

Career

Mason began a degree in mathematics in 1989 in Trinity College Dublin. [1] In 1991 he became the first employee at IONA Technologies. As part of his work at IONA, Mason established the LPRng mailing list and collaborated on the development of LPRng for a period. [2] [3]

In 1993, Mason set up a web server in IONA, the first web server outside academia in Ireland. [1] [4] Initially, the site just included pages for his own use, but with Colin Newman they put together web pages for the company and its object request broker.

In 1999, Mason moved to Netnote International, an Irish company developing a low-cost device for internet access. [1]

Mason had been maintaining a number of patches against an anti-spam program named filter.plx by Mark Jeftovic. This led to Mason creating SpamAssassin, taking inspiration from Jeftovic's code, and uploading the result to SourceForge in April 2001. [5] Mason moved to work at DeerSoft, a company founded by Craig Hughes to provide a Windows version of SpamAssassin. [6] In 2002 DeerSoft was acquired by NAI and became part of McAfee's enterprise anti-spam team.

In 2004, the SpamAssassin project became an Apache Software Foundation project, with Mason becoming one of the Project Management Committee members and acting as vice president for the SpamAssassin PMC between 2006 and 2008. [7] [8]

Mason served as a technical advisory board member for MailChannels. [9]

Mason continued to contribute to the Apache Software Foundation and SpamAssassin for a number of years. More recently[ when? ], Mason has worked at companies including Amazon and Swrve developing cloud deployment, logging and monitoring tools, including RateLimitedLogger, SLF4J-compatible rate-limited logging API for Java. [10] [11] [12]

Other activities

Mason acted as a technical officer to the original IrelandOffline committee. [13]

In addition to SpamAssassin, Mason has developed several open source projects, including a number of CPAN packages and gif320, an image viewer for VT320 terminals. [14] [15]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Justin Mason - Iona Technologies sysadmin and software engineer 1992-1999". TechArchives. August 2023. Retrieved 31 August 2025.
  2. ↑ "LPRng-HOWTO". MIT . 18 December 1998. Retrieved 31 August 2025.
  3. ↑ Powell, Patrick; Mason, Justin (1995). "LPRng-An Enhanced Printer Spooler System" (PDF). Proceedings of the Ninth System Administration Conference. LISA '95. LISA. Monterey, California, USA: USENIX . Retrieved 31 August 2025.
  4. ↑ Malone, David. "Early Irish Web Stuff". maths.tcd.ie. Trinity College Dublin . Retrieved 31 August 2025.
  5. ↑ "SpamAssassin Prehistory". Apache Foundation. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  6. ↑ "Anti anti anti - NAI buys DeerSoft Inc". Virus Bulletin. 7 January 2003. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  7. ↑ "The History of SpamAssassin: How an Ingenious Idea Evolved into a World-Renowned Anti-Spam Platform". Guardian Digital. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  8. ↑ "Board Meetings And Calendar". The Apache Software Foundation . Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  9. ↑ Cawley, David (2007). "Some Our Favorite Email Security Blogs". MailChannels . Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  10. ↑ Ahlstrom, Dick (17 March 2014). "How the Irish helped weave the web". www.irishtimes.com. Irish Times . Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  11. ↑ USgranted US12074756B2,Richendra Khanna, Edward L. Wallace, Jagwinder Singh Brar, Michael David Marr, Samuel J. McKelvie, Peter N. DeSantis, Ian P. Nowland, Matthew D. Klein, Justin Mason, Jacob Gabrielson,"Monitoring and detecting causes of failures of network paths",published 1 June 2023,issued 27 August 2024, assigned to Amazon Technologies Inc
  12. ↑ "rate-limited-logger an SLF4J-compatible, simple, fluent API for rate-limited logging in Java". github. Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  13. ↑ Harran, Martin (21 June 2001). "IOFFL - Report on Public Meeting". Usenet . Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  14. ↑ "All Releases by Justin Mason". meta::CPAN. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  15. ↑ "A GIF viewer for DEC VT320 terminals". github. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
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