Subject: Spam Filter Y2.1K Bug

From: Glen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:45:07 -0800

All -

For those of you who may have experienced alcohol-related blackouts in
the past 48 hours, please be advised that the year is now 2010.

This is relevant for many reasons, one of which is that there appears to
be a bug in "SpamAssassin", one of the spam filtering programs used on
our servers.

A particular rule that checks the date of messages with the purpose of
finding messages that are "far in the future" apparently does NOT know
that the year is 2010.

As a result, as of yesterday morning, this rule started to be applied to
all mail processed by SpamAssassin installations worldwide, resulting in
a significant increase in legitimate mail being incorrectly tagged as
Spam.  The rule in question was designed to find mail that was extremely
off-date, and, therefore, the rule had a very high default score, which
would push tagged mail well over all reasonable spam thresholds.

This bug affects everyone, and has been documented everywhere:
https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=6269 et al.

I found this problem in my own mail yesterday evening, and removed that
rule from all of our servers at that time.  However, from 00:01 until
about 19:30 Pacific time January 1, some legitimate mail sent through
our servers may have been incorrectly tagged as spam.

Please check your spam folders, mailing list moderation queues, and
other relevant locations to ensure that any held mail gets found and
released.

If you sent mail through our servers, and it did not go through, you may
wish to simply send it again.  The rule has been cleared, and mail is
flowing normally once again.  You may wish to notify your clients and/or
associates about this problem.  As this is a global problem, you should
consider checking all mail servers you have interaction with, worldwide,
until this gets fixed.

Happy new year.
Glen

Glen Barney
IT Director
AMS