Back to Community Threads
Spamfoo info request
Question asked by MattyT - 8/4/2026 at 11:08 AM
Unanswered
I'm looking forward to giving this a go, but I'm not quite ready to upset the "apple cart" of anti-spam processes I currently maintain. I don't know if this has been previously addressed anywhere in the ST forum, but if anyone from ST is willing to comment I'd like to know more about this company itself. Also, I hope this doesn't touch a nerve in that my question shouldn't be construed as criticism at all, but a clarifying one.

The Spamfoo web site is extremely limited in regard to information about who they are. At first, I just wanted to discover if it was a foreign entity (i.e. a startup from behind the Great Wall or from Moscow) but after searching the Spamfoo web site, it was clear that there is zero information about the founders, owners, or corporation. There is no forum on the site to interact with developers or any community. Buried in the terms of service is a line about it being governed by the laws of Arizona, the same state where SmarterTools is located. I suspect that it's a subsidiary of ST, of some type, but the staff here refers to Spamfoo in the third person, generally. I have seen scores of interesting software companies attempting to hide corporate addresses in order to appear like it is a US or European company, for legitimacy and potential reputational reasons, only to discover with more effort that the company is based out of Beijing, etc. Clearly this is not the case with Spamfoo.

The main reason why I ask is that I look forward to being able to run Spamfoo on a mail gateway or a dedicated spam appliance like rspamd. That way, I can "throw" a GPU at it to improve model performance, seeing that someone stated in a forum post that the GPU option is disabled in the SmarterMail add-in service. If the rspamd add-in option ever avails itself, I wouldn't think that the ST forums would be the place to discuss this if it isn't a SmarterTools product. In the end, Spamfoo ownership isn't really anyone's business (apart from the owners themselves) but it sure is a bit mysterious based upon statements here. Seeing that there is now a dedicated Spamfoo category, it seems more likely that it is a SmarterTools product.

Again, no criticism, just asking for clarification whether it's a true third party product or an ST one. I think it's a fair one if we SmarterMail admins are trusting this software on our servers.

Cheers, all.

Matt
Tim Uzzanti Replied
8/4/2026 at 2:07 PM
Employee Post
Matt,

I appreciate your post. However, I have a question. Do you genuinely believe we’d partner with a company based in Moscow or China, especially when the documentation references Arizona?

In addition, we’ve shared that SpamFoo was one of many startups we’ve incubated over the years. We were blown away by the technologies they had, and we became early investors.

This is why we have a fairly close relationship with them, and, to be honest, I would like to have a closer relationship or even more input into the direction of the company. That is a conversation for another day.

One of the big hurdles we are trying to overcome is trying to get SpamFoo to provide all our customers who have purchased Cyren and Message Sniffer a free license of SpamFoo until the maintenance and support expires. As you can guess, they’re not really interested in giving away millions of dollars in product.

Cyren and Message Sniffer, once considered effective solutions against spam, have become obsolete due to their rules-based approach and use of honey pots, etc. Both companies were acquired a couple of years ago and have since experienced significant regression. Message Sniffer is no longer receiving updates, while Cyren’s infrastructure has been plagued by connectivity issues, which have been a major complaint in our support department.

This is where we stand now, but I hope to have more information shortly on our relationship with SpamFoo.
Tim Uzzanti
CEO
SmarterTools Inc.
MattyT Replied
8/4/2026 at 3:37 PM
>China, Moscow.

Tim, my goodness, no. I simply used it as an example! I should have added that, often times, when companies hide their office's location or headquarters address, it is often an attempt at obfuscation based on my experience. I wasn't suggesting that you guys were partnering with some fly-by-night company. Of course not! Hey, I have been trying to build my own AI powered spam filter this year with limited and varying results. So, for sure, I am confident that this Spamfoo undertaking will be a success seeing how Message Sniffer and Cyren certainly have lost efficacy in the spam battle. 

Thanks for the reply, and keep up the great work.

Matt
Tim Uzzanti Replied
8/4/2026 at 4:12 PM
Employee Post
I'm a bit defensive at times in the community; people seem to want to think the worst. In regards to the GPU support, it’s available to be used on SmarterMail today; you just need to enable the channel for GPU, which downloads additional packages from SpamFoo that the normal user doesn't need.  

SpamFoo is going to release a dameon that can be installed on a standalone server, and we will be including External SpamFoo support like we do for Rspamd and SpamAssassin. 

GPUs, as we know, can be costly, and being able to point a handful of mail servers to a single SpamFoo server and fully utilize your GPU hardware would be a good way to handle things for customers with a lot of mail servers. 

In our case, we do a lot of Google Cloud for production servers, and it’s nice that Google provides various GPU support, and we could pick a low-cost one on each of our mail servers if we wanted. But, we see good enough results using the CPU.

Overall, it’s nice to have all these options.
Tim Uzzanti
CEO
SmarterTools Inc.
Tim Uzzanti Replied
8/4/2026 at 4:17 PM
Employee Post
Matt,

Also, I would only suggest enabling that channel if you are actually going to test it, as it doubles the memory SpamFoo will use due to the additional packages, etc.  I think its like 400mb to 800mb or something like that. 
Tim Uzzanti
CEO
SmarterTools Inc.
Grady Werner Replied
8/4/2026 at 4:45 PM
Employee Post
Here's a link to SpamFoo's help topic about GPU acceleration for anyone who wants it. https://help.spamfoo.com/gpu-acceleration
Grady Werner
SmarterTools Inc.
Back to Community Threads

Reply to Thread

Enter the verification text
Tags
SpamFoo
Related Knowledge Base Articles
How an Email is Processed in Current SmarterMail BuildsSmarterMail > Server Configuration and Management
Force Traffic Over HTTPS when using a Reverse ProxySmarterMail > Server Configuration and Management
Automated SSL certificate Issues.SmarterMail > Troubleshooting
Outlook 2016 for Office 365 and AutodiscoverSmarterMail > Desktop and Mobile Synchronization
Set up Autodiscover for SmarterMailSmarterMail > Installation and Configuration