Re: Spam Filter Y2.1K Bug

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



On Sat, Jan 02, 2010 at 12:45:07PM -0800, Glen wrote:
> 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.

Good morning/day:

I have received a surprising number of messages over the past 72 hours
pointing out that the problem was not a "Y2.1K" bug, but rather a "Y2.01K"
bug.

In my defense... 

The problem in question surrounded a specific rule: FH_DATE_PAST_20XX . As
you can see from the name of the rule, it is only supposed to hit email
that was dated past 2099.  However, it turns out that the rule was hitting
all email past 2009.  Because the rule had a base score of 20, which is 
well above the threshhold of 5 used by the IETF lists, almost every email
sent was being tagged as Spam.

... so I was beguiled by the name of the rule, which clearly clouded by
decimal-point-placement-judgement.

Only in this community could I expect such overwhelming dedication to 
such precision.  :-D  I bow to the wisdom of the collective, and humbly
acknowledge my decimal-point error. :-D

On a more serious note...

This problem exists globally, in all SpamAssassin installations worldwide,
and doubtless will take days or longer for every IT department in the world
to notice, research, figure out and fix.

Until every SpamAssassin installtion in a user's chain of email is fixed,
some email will continue to be incorrectly tagged as Spam for many of you.

However, THIS PROBLEM HAS BEEN FIXED AT AMS, and was fixed as of January 1.

What I did, on January 1, in the late evening, was to apply a new score rule:

SCORE FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0

This effectively "disabled" that rule, so that 2010 mail would no longer be
tagged as Spam.

I've gotten several reports this morning that mail to some lists is still
being tagged as Spam.  I've taken extra steps, such as resetting the 
autowhitelist system built into SpamAssassin, to try to bring things back
to normal.  In the meantime, SpamAssassin may have additional
problems or interactions we haven't discovered yet, and I will be
working with list moderators to identify and analyze any other spam
filtering issues that may be present.

One thing that often happens is that people reply to a message, but
they don't end up removing the "SPAM" wording from the Subject. 
Therefore, that wording can be preserved through the thread and sent
back and forth through the list.  This does not indicate that the
spam system here is still broken, this only indicates that people
are resending the spam tagging in the Subject line, by hitting reply
and not editing the subject.  Please be mindful of this if it occurs.

A happy new year - which is NOT a new century! - to you all.

Glen
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

[Index of Archives]     [IETF Annoucements]     [IETF]     [IP Storage]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux SCTP]     [Linux Newbies]     [Fedora Users]