About Rspamd
Rspamd is a spam filtering system and email processing framework. It evaluates each message against many rules, including regular expressions, statistical analysis and custom services such as URL blacklists, and returns a verdict that a mail transfer agent can act on, for example by rejecting the message or adding a header that marks it as spam.
It can act as a Milter, which lets it work directly with common mail servers such as Postfix and Sendmail. The results can also include DKIM signature details and suggested modifications to a message. Rspamd is designed to process many messages in parallel and offers a comprehensive Lua API, plus an asynchronous network API for reaching external resources like DNS, HTTP and generic TCP or UDP services.
Many spam filtering modules and features are enabled out of the box, and you can write your own rules and plugins in Lua. It is written in C and packaged for the major Linux distributions as well as FreeBSD ports, NetBSD pkgsrc and OpenBSD ports. The project recommends its own packages over distribution ones, which may be outdated. A quick start guide explains installation and configuration.
Key features
- Rule-based and statistical spam scoring
- Milter integration for Postfix and Sendmail
- Lua API for custom rules and plugins
- DKIM signature information in results
- Asynchronous access to DNS and HTTP services
- Packages for Linux and BSD systems
Good fit for
- →Filtering spam on self-hosted mail servers
- →Building custom email processing rules
- Built with
- C
- Tags
- spam-filter
- mail-server
- milter
- lua
- postfix
- security
- self-hosted
Rspamd: questions and answers
- What is Rspamd used for?
- Rspamd is a fast spam filtering system and email processing framework that integrates with mail servers such as Postfix and Sendmail. It is a good fit for filtering spam on self-hosted mail servers and building custom email processing rules.
- Is Rspamd open source?
- Yes. Rspamd is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at rspamd/rspamd and is written mainly in C.
- Is Rspamd free?
- Yes. Rspamd is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.
- Can I self-host Rspamd?
- Yes. Rspamd can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
- What is Rspamd an alternative to?
- Rspamd is an open-source alternative to Mimecast and Proofpoint.
- Is Rspamd actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Rspamd was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is 4.2.1, published on 1 October 2026. The project has 2.5k stars on GitHub.
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