Announcing Alpha Release: EFA Collective (Threat Intelligence for OpenEFA)

[adrastosefa]

We are formally announcing the alpha stage of the EFA Collective, a new community-driven threat intelligence system built into OpenEFA.

This initial alpha release introduces the registration and submission pipeline, allowing administrators from multiple OpenEFA instances to securely submit forensic email intelligence for evaluation by the OpenEFA team.

This marks the first foundational step in building a shared intelligence layer designed to strengthen spam detection, phishing defense, and overall email security across the OpenEFA ecosystem.


What Is the EFA Collective?

The EFA Collective is intended to become a dynamic, shared intelligence system that aggregates real-world telemetry from OpenEFA deployments. Rather than relying on static, third-party RBLs and other legacy mechanisms, the Collective is being designed to evolve continuously based on observed threats, patterns, and outcomes from production environments.

At this stage, the focus is on data ingestion, validation, and analysis.


Alpha Capabilities (Current)

In the current alpha phase, registered OpenEFA instances can submit reports that include sanitized forensic data such as:

- Message metadata and headers
- SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication results
- Spam and machine-learning classification scores
- Content and NLP analysis
- Network and sender indicators
- OpenEFA-specific analytical headers

These reports allow our team to evaluate emerging spam campaigns, identify false positives, detect new attack patterns, and refine detection logic.


Registration Phase (Alpha)

The Collective is currently in a controlled registration phase.

- Registration is initiated by a superadmin
- Each instance is uniquely identified
- Submissions are reviewed and evaluated by the OpenEFA team
- Approval is required before reporting becomes active

This phase is intentionally manual and deliberate to ensure data quality, proper sanitization, and system integrity as the Collective is built out.


Why This Matters

Email threats are no longer well served by static blocklists, delayed updates, or opaque third-party feeds. Attackers adapt too quickly, infrastructure changes too often, and legacy approaches lack context.

The EFA Collective is being built to:

- Replace static RBL dependence with living intelligence
- Leverage real-world OpenEFA telemetry
- Improve detection accuracy while reducing false positives
- Enable faster response to emerging threats
- Keep intelligence transparent, auditable, and community-driven

This alpha release represents the first building block of that vision.


What Comes Next

Future phases will expand beyond submission and evaluation to include:

- Sanitized, shared intelligence distribution
- Collective-driven detection signals
- Dynamic reputation modeling
- Pattern-based scoring informed by real incidents
- Progressive reduction of legacy RBL reliance


Call for Participation

We are actively inviting OpenEFA administrators to participate in the alpha registration phase. Early participation helps shape the Collective, validate the pipeline, and ensure the system is built around real operational needs.

This is the beginning of a long-term effort to redefine how email security intelligence is built, shared, and applied.

More details and documentation will follow as the alpha progresses.

Read the full announcement: