I came home after newyear and was flabbergasted as soon as I saw, I had no mail! With exception of my whitelist, which is bitter small. After reading Slashdot, I’ve noticed Spamassassin has a 2010 bug, dropping legit mails to spam or nowhere; depending on the account settings.

There are two ways to fix this by hand; to keep the ability to thwart mails coming from the future (after 2014 in this case):

Step 1: edit the ruleset file.

• With root privileges: Edit the file /usr/share/spamassassin/72_active.cf
• Without root privileges: Add to the file ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs

Step 2: find/add or change FH_DATE_PAST_20XX:


##{ FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
header FH_DATE_PAST_20XX Date =~ /20(1[4-9]|[2-9][0-9])/ [if-unset: 2006]
describe FH_DATE_PAST_20XX The date is grossly in the future.
##} FH_DATE_PAST_20XX


I wish variables could be used in regexps like these, like $year + 2 would be a nice start….

Alternative Step: Automatic update of rulesets

The Spamassassin rules can be updated automatically by executing the following command:

• any unix system: sa-update && /etc/init.d/spamassassin reload
• Directadmin: /usr/local/directadmin/scripts/packages/Mail-SpamAssassin-3.2.5/sa-update && /etc/init.d/spamassassin reload
• admispconfig: /usr/local/admispconfig/ispconfig/tools/spamassassin/usr/bin/sa-update && /etc/init.d/spamassassin reload

Enjoy your mail without spam coming from the future!

02/jan/2010: Thanks go to mike for the even more-fine-grain regexp: 20(1[4-9]|[2-9][0-9])/

I’ve been busy with a very strange bug lately. A few weeks ago I’ve tried to fix it by using the normal quota procedures but still I was getting that dreadful DirectAdmin message with:

Error with system Quotas
setquota: Mountpoint (or device) /home not found.
setquota: Not all specified mountpoints are using quota.

Normally, the line /sbin/quotaoff -a ; /sbin/quotacheck -avugm ; /sbin/quotaon -a should fix it, but still, I got a rather nasty error with that:

root@mother:/# /sbin/quotacheck -avugm
quotacheck: Cannot create new quotafile //aquota.user.new: File exists
quotacheck: Cannot initialise IO on new quotafile: File exists
quotacheck: Cannot create new quotafile //aquota.group.new: File exists
quotacheck: Cannot initialise IO on new quotafile: File exists
quotacheck: Scanning /dev/cciss/c0d1p1 [/home]
....

I’ve solved this finally by renaming four files and running the same command again. Seems to be a (new) bug in Debian Etch? ..


cd / ; mv aquota.user.new aquota.user.trash ; cd /home ; mv aquota.user.new aquota.user.trash

I’ve had no group quotas defined, the same probably has to be done with aquota.group.new.