Recently, I’ve been seeing more and more reports of users saying that good email are getting marked as spam. This issue is due to a bug in SpamAssassin that treats dates past 20xx as far future dates. Fortunately, you can easily update your spam assassin rules to fix this issue.

The bug causes emails with a date of 2010 to be hit with a higher spam score by 3.2 points. As a result, these emails could get blocked.

If your SpamAssassin install adds headers, you can see this as a:

FH_DATE_PAST_20XX

rule violation.

To correct this issue, you can run:

sa-update

Which should pull down the latest SpamAssassin rules. This works on SpamAssassin version 3.2 and above.

By default, Plesk does not automatically update SpamAssassin rules. There is a cron job in:

/etc/cron.d/sa-update

But by default it is disabled. On Plesk servers, you may want to modify:

/usr/share/spamassassin/sa-update.cron

To call

/etc/rc.d/init.d/psa-spamassassin restart

Instead of the default SpamAssassin start up script.