Stuff…

There is a bug in some older rulebase versions for spam assassin 3.x which will cause an extra 3.4 points to be added onto incoming mail which greatly increases the chances of the mail being marked as spam.

The rule “FH_DATE_PAST_20XX” checks to see if the email is from the future, however, since the new year it has been triggering and adding 3.4 extra points onto emails.

Two methods to update the rules are :

1. With sa-update (More information can be found here: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/RuleUpdates) or
2. Manually edit the file that contains the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX rule.  The rules are normally found in /usr/share/spamassassin and you could search all of the rule files for FH_DATE_PAST_20XX with:  grep FH_DATE_PAST_20XX /usr/share/spamassassin/*

The file (On Ubuntu 8.04 is 72_active.cf) may look like:

##{ FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
header   FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      Date =~ /20[1-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]^M
describe FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      The date is grossly in the future.^M
##} FH_DATE_PAST_20XX

Whereas a temporary fix would look like:

##{ FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
header   FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      Date =~ /20[2-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]^M
describe FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      The date is grossly in the future.^M
##} FH_DATE_PAST_20XX

After sa-update or manually updating you should restart the spamassassin daemon.