Mason began a degree in mathematics in 1989 in
Trinity College Dublin. 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. In 1993, Mason set up a
web server in IONA, the first web server outside academia in Ireland. 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. Mason moved to work at DeerSoft, a company founded by Craig Hughes to provide a
Windows version of SpamAssassin. 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. Mason served as a technical advisory board member for
MailChannels. Mason continued to contribute to the Apache Software Foundation and SpamAssassin for a number of years. More recently, 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. ==Other activities==