Friday, January 1, 2010

Y2K revisited

This morning a Spam Assassin date bug was discovered, causing any email sent since the turn-over of 01/01/2010 to be tagged with the following rule:

FH_DATE_PAST_20XX The date is grossly in the future, and assigned a score of 3.2. Since the default spam score for SpamAssassin is 5.0 (on our server it's set to 6.0, to guard against false positives), this could be a problem.

It's presumably been fixed and will be pushed out in the next sa-update, but we've disabled the rule just the same. If you're not a hosting customer of ours you might want to check to see if your provider has fixed this issue, and/or check your spam folder for false positives.

With the turn of the decade there's been a lot of "Where were you 10 years ago?" memes going around on social networking sites. I didn't really think much about it until this morning, where dealing with this "date bug" has given me a Y2K flashback.

I was invited to the Sun holiday party, though it was scheduled for late January 2000, because everyone was on high alert for Y2K issues. In case you're wondering...the party was incredible, and the Y2K issues were far less than expected, mostly due to proper preparations.


I'd really thought this wouldn't be an issue again until 2038. Guess I was wrong. *smiles*

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday, and wish you all a prosperous, happy and healthy new year.