New year – and a little year 2010 bug

The 200x ended and we went into 2010. So we got ourselves a little 2010 bug. It was in the spam filtering software Spamassassin. Or to be more precise in it’s rulesets.

The problem was actually discovered and fixed months ago but someone forgot to include it in the rulesets for Spamassassin 3.2.x. No hard feelings about that. Those guys are doing a great job and shit do happen. It was fixed in a couple of hours on January 1, 2010.

The problem was that all incoming mail filtered by Spamassassin was flagged with FH_PAST_DATE_20XX and given an extra +3.4 spam score which results in false positives.

Those that were running sa-update by cron had this automatically fixed as the updated rules were on the servers around noon on January 1, 2010. Those not running sa-update by cron… still have problems unless they have run sa-update manually. Saying that, running sa-update by cron might be a good idea to keep your Spamassassin rules updated 🙂 A script for doing so and getting a mail with the result can be found here.

Some FreeBSD users reported that sa-update was not able to pull down the updated rules. A manual workaround and links to details around the problem is found here.