The SAY2K10 bug

SpamAssassin is crucial infrastructure, at least for some of us. So it was with some dismay that your editor, while performing a quick New Year's Day disaster check, noted that SpamAssassin had not made the adjustment to 2010 in good form. The bug was straightforward and easy to fix, but it merits a closer look for what it reveals about our infrastructure and how we support it.

The task assigned to SpamAssassin, of course, is to look over incoming email and assign a score to each message indicating how likely that message is to be spam. It does this job surprisingly well; your editor currently receives around 5,000 spams per day - one every 17 seconds or so - but it's a bad day if two dozen of those get past SpamAssassin and show up in the inbox. Put simply: without SpamAssassin, your editor's email address would simply be unusable. All it takes is a five-minute window without spamd running to see what life would be like if the incoming mail stream had to be dealt with in its full, unfiltered glory. This is mission-critical software, so any faults which turn up in it tend to be of great concern.

The core of SpamAssassin is a vast set of rules looking for spammy characteristics in incoming email. The rules match anything that the developers think might indicate spam; some of the tests include:

• The presence of a rot13-encoded email address.

• Large numbers of blank lines.

• The originating address is in any of a number of network blacklists.

• Discussion of medication in a number of forms.

• HTML messages with huge fonts.

• The presence of URLs registered to known spammers.

...and so on. Each matching rule adds a numeric score to the message; when the process is complete, the scores are added up to yield a total spamminess value. The bayesian recognizer also gets a chance to look at the message and add a score of its own. At the conclusion of this process, any message with a score of 5.0 or higher (by default) is considered to be spam.

Some years ago, a SpamAssassin developer noticed that some unwanted mail came in with dates far in the future. These messages almost certainly represent an attempt by spammers to take advantage of mail clients which sort messages by date; a far-future date should show up at the top of the list. To deal with these messages, said developer wrote a rule matching any date from the year 2010 or afterward. At the time, 2010 was some years in the future, so the rule seemed to make sense. Surely somebody would fix it long before that distant year arrived.

The scores assigned to rules in SpamAssassin are not random, but neither are they assigned by the rule authors. Instead, the project uses a "perceptron" program to determine which combination of scores performs best against a large body of spam and "ham" email. When this tool was run, legitimate email from 2010 was indeed a rare thing, so the rule turned out to be a very good positive indicator for spam. As a result, it was assigned a score which, in some situations, could be as high as 3.5.

As of January 1, mail with 2010 dates suddenly became rather more common. With the year-2010 rule now firing on every message, the SpamAssassin threshold was, in effect, lowered from 5.0 to as low as 1.5. That, in turn, caused a fair amount of legitimate email to be classified as spam, a most unwelcome development. Your editor, receiving 5,000 spams every day, has long since stopped scanning the spam folder for false positives; even if they exist (which they almost never do), they represent a needle which is almost impossible to find in a haystack that large. So email classified as spam is, for all practical purposes, simply lost.

As described in Justin Mason's weblog, the year-2010 problem was noted by a SpamAssassin developer in 2008. The rule was duly fixed in the project's repository, and promptly forgotten about. What the SpamAssassin developers did not do was any of (1) informing the user community of the rule change, (2) making a new major release with the fixed rule, or (3) distributing the rule fix through the sa-update channel, which exists for just this purpose. So everybody was caught by surprise - users, distributors, Internet service providers, and the SpamAssassin developers themselves.

All told, the harm caused by this problem was relatively small and mostly recoverable. It is a very small blot on SpamAssassin's long record of making email usable for large numbers of people. But it highlights a few points which are worthy of note:

• Even those of us who are not running financial exchanges have critical infrastructure based on free software. When something goes wrong with that infrastructure, it can hurt our businesses, social lives, and more.

• Software which plays a crucial part on our operations should really have a mechanism in place to get important fixes to users quickly. But, just as importantly, that project has to take great care to ensure that important fixes get routed into that channel. SpamAssassin developers had fixed the 2010 problem a long time ago, but that was not helpful for users, who had no way of knowing about the problem or its fix. In the kernel realm, it has taken some years to build the discipline of looking over patches and considering them for stable kernel updates; there's probably still a fair number of important fixes which do not get to stable kernel users because nobody thinks to route them to the stable kernel maintainers.

• Important software requires a certain amount of development and review time. So it's discouraging to read in Justin's weblog that his SpamAssassin work happens in his scarce spare time, and that the project is, in general, short of active developers. Your editor suspects that the truth of the matter is this: SpamAssassin is long past its period of rapid development. At this point, it works well, to the point that there's not a lot of work to be done. So the interested developers have gone on to other projects.

It would appear that what SpamAssassin needs is some dedicated maintenance talent which is not dependent on evening hours put in by developers committed to other projects. Typically that is the sort of work that requires a paying customer. Given how many people and companies rely on this software, it seems like it should be possible to find the money to motivate somebody to put more time into SpamAssassin maintenance. The hard part is collecting and administering those funds; that's not something that the free software community has yet reliably become good at doing.

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