You want "score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0".
A special treat for the ten year anniversary of Y2K...
SpamAssassin gives any message sent in 2010 a default score of 3.2 because that date "is grossly in the future." But it gets better: they discovered and "fixed" this in June 2009... but never bothered to push out a release. Because being fixed in CVS is good enough, right? That's the Linux way.
Tags: computers, doomed, firstperson, linux, spam
Current Music: Course of Empire -- Coming of the Century ♬
18 Responses:
Why are they using a fixed date or string pattern to determine if a message is "grossly in the future"? Is there a reasonable explanation I don't see?
The check is with a regular expression (jwz: "now you have two problems"), with ranges to match years that are 20xx but not 200x. Given what I found when looking into the problem my guess is that SpamAssassin being written in Perl made regular expressions the "natural" choice for such a check, and parsing dates/calculating offsets was only added as check functionality much later.
For extra fail, it was pointed out in late 2008 that this was going to be a problem, but took until mid 2009 for the fix to make it into CVS, and until it was widely noted as actually causing problems for anything to be pushed out.
Ewen
FWIW, if you run 'sa-update', it should pull down a new set of rules with a fix for this. That may be better than zero-ing out the rule.
That said, yeah, fixing this in advance would have been nice.
It was not fixed in the sa-update feed as of 5am today. Did they change it later than that?
I don't know the exact time frame, but it is fixed via sa-update as of earlier today -- see https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=6269 for details
Sometime around 15:00 PST. It's updated to fail in 2020 as of sa-update rules version 895075.
thank god they kicked that can further down the road. An elegant solution to an elegant problem. Thanks, guys!
Gotta love comment 4 on that bug report:
Imma get up and go find a desk just so I can *headdesk*
Alternatively,
header FH_DATE_PAST_20XX Date =~ /20[2-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]also "solves the problem".I just changed mine to that until a real fix comes out. I also changed the describe line for it to "The date may or may not be grossly in the future. There is a possibility the date may be in the past." for increased accuracy.
Finally! We live in the future now!
Not just in the future, *grossly* in the future. I think that just about sums up these grim meathook times.
I had just noticed that everything non-local and non-whitelisted was suddenly appearing in my spam folder.
Thank you for sharing this!
Also I note that RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET is now listing many (but not all) of Facebook's outgoing mail servers on the blacklist. Thanks, guys, that's really helpful.
That suprises me a bit, they're usually pretty reasonable...
I'll alert some authorities :)
awesome.
This kind of bullshit is exactly why I stopped running my own mail server and sold my soul to the Global Electronic Brain.