Shades of Y2K! Mike Cardwell reports on a rule in Spamassassin that judges any message sent in or after 2010 as “grossly in the future” and treats this as evidence of it being spam. I just checked and found that our mail server’s Spamassassin is using this buggy FH_DATE_PAST_20XX rule.
If you are using Spamassassin, or think your mail server might be, check the source of mail you have received today. Here’s an example from one of my messages this morning.
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.5 ... on mail.cs.umbc.edu X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.6 required=5.0 tests=AWL,FH_DATE_PAST_20XX autolearn=disabled version=3.2.5 Received: from mail-yw0-f142.google.com (mail-yw0-f142.google.com [209.85.211.142]) by mail.cs.umbc.edu (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP id o01DjJUn011187; Fri, 1 Jan 2010 08:45:19 -0500 (EST)
If the message exceeds the local spam score threshold for, you may find a block with more details in your message header, like this example.
Content analysis details: (6.1 points, 5.0 required) pts rule name description ---- ---------------------- ---------------------------------- 3.4 FH_DATE_PAST_20XX The date is grossly in the future. -4.0 RCVD_IN_DNSWL_MED RBL: Sender listed at http://www.dnswl.org/, medium trust [130.85.25.80 listed in list.dnswl.org] 1.8 SUBJ_ALL_CAPS Subject is all capitals 0.7 MSOE_MID_WRONG_CASE MSOE_MID_WRONG_CASE 4.2 FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK Forged mail pretending to be from MS Outlook
As a workaround until your server updates Spamassassin, the points that the rule adds to a message’s spam score can be lowered to 0.0 in Spamassassin’s configuration file (local.cf) or your own user-prefs file.
score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0
