Versions 3.2 of SpamAssassin have (until very recently) a bug in their rules which would mark mails dated 2010 (this year) as being spam.

The reason for this is that a rule exists which would add an additional score of 3.2 to mails with a date set to 2010, because when the rule was created, the date would be in the very far future. Of course, this is no longer the case.

The bug was already discovered in 2008, and resolved in the SpamAssassin repositories, but was not backported to 3.2 until 2010-01-01, when the issue was discovered by Mike Cardwell, a developer in the UK.

How to resolve?

Users with this problem can easily resolve it by updating the rules:

sa-update

This changes the regexp so it excludes the range 2010-2019.

Alternate solution: if sa-update does not work, add/change this line in local.cf, disabling this rule altogether:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

Original source: The H Open Source: SpamAssassin's new year hangover

See also

• SpamAssassin Rule: FH_DATE_PAST_20XX