Having Spamassassin Problems?

Published: 2010-01-02
Last Updated: 2010-01-02 15:20:31 UTC
by Marcus Sachs (Version: 2)
4 comment(s)

Karl sent us a note about date parsing issues in Spamassassin.  I thought we fixed all of these problems ten years ago when we went through the Y2K transition.  Apparently not.  More details are at these URLs:

http://www.arrfab.net/blog/?p=174
https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=6269
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/spamassassin/trunk/rulesrc/sandbox/emailed/00_FVGT_File001.cf?r1=794319&r2=796216&diff_format=h

Thanks for the info Karl!

UPDATE 1

In addition to the comments below, one of our readers sent in this note:

Run "saupdate" or create the following line in your local.cf file:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0

You can learn about sa-update here:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/RuleUpdates

The sa-update path is preferred.

Thanks for the comments Joanne!

Marcus H. Sachs
Director, SANS Internet Storm Center

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4 comment(s)

Comments

There is also a problem with "date" on Linux. Try this command to show the year: date '+%G'
Looks like I spoke to soon... :(

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2010-01/msg00008.html
Noticed this too...

(I find it valuable to have all my mailservers email me hourly from a cron job, and at the receiving end [which runs spamassassin] a .procmailrc script greps out the X-Spam-Status line containing a list of all test hits; if it doesn't match an expected set of values I receive an email alert; it can detect various DNS/config issues that might affect mail deliverability, as well as alerting me to this Spamassassin issue yesterday.)

As long as people are running sa-update daily, this problem should fix itself sometime today; the bug was fixed some time ago but apparently not pushed through to updates.spamassassin.org until yesterday.
date +%G seems to be working fine here. Note that on 2010-01-01 through 2010-01-03 it would display "2009" as suggested in the man page: "year of ISO week number (see %V); normally useful only with %V". If you want the calendar year you should be using %Y. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date for more info on how this works.

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