This blog entry is a little late on this topic, as it’s something which has been affecting email users since January 1st, 2010 but for people out there such as myself who didn’t realize there was a problem until recently, or ever for that matter, I wanted to be able to educate you.
You could be missing out on vital emails!
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce to you… Y2K10
Y2K10 is a rule coded into SPAM Assassin (the most commonly used server SPAM filter) which causes the software to flag any email written in the year 2010 as ‘far into the future’ and therefore it flags it as SPAM and therefore, depending on your SPAM settings, it could do one of the following:
- Flagged an email as SPAM but still deliver it to your Inbox.
- Mark the email as SPAM and deliver it to a separate SPAM-designated folder.
- Bounce the email back to the sender and you will never have received it. Yes, even legitimate mail – which is my reason for bringing this to your attention.
Personally, I had the first scenario. And the most annoying, perplexing thing to me was that it marked EVERY single piece of mail as SPAM. Thank GOD I didn’t have my settings configured to send it to a separate folder or else I would have missed out on 2 weeks worth of email (I only turned on SPAM Assassin 2 weeks ago).
I have read other blog posts which claim that there must be other factors besides just the date which are causing these emails to be flagged, however such was not the case in my situation. It outright marked all of my mail as SPAM.
SPAM Assassin tells us that they have released a patch to fix this problem, however depending on your email server/host, if they haven’t deployed the patch you will not see any improvement until they install it.
So, for now, if you wish to prevent emails from getting lost, bounced or otherwise marked as SPAM, the only way to “fix” this is to go into your email SPAM settings on your server and disable them. If you don’t know how to do that, I advise you contact your web administrator and have them go in and do it for you.
And if you don’t have an administrator or anyone to help you with your website and related services, contact us! Technical assistance is something we can provide.
