Fixing SpamAssassin’s FORGED_HOTMAIL_RCVD false positives
Lately people have been telling me about emails that I never received. A quick analysis reveals that these ended up in my Trash folder - meaning that SpamAssassin gave them a high spam rating.
After delving into Perl and examining Hotmail's mail headers, it seems that Hotmail recently changed the structure of their headers (probably with the merge with Windows Live Mail), and as such the characteristic header style that SpamAssassin expects from Hotmail's SMTP servers isn't found, and it thinks that its a spammer is pretending to be hotmail.
Luckily, SpamAssassin 3.2.x has a new FORGED_HOTMAIL_RCVD2 header with the new hotmail header structure defined. But this version isn't available in the stable Debian Etch. Version 3.2.x is, however, in the Debian Lenny repository, and being all Perl, installs and runs fine on Etch with no extra dependancies. All of your settings from Etch's SA will still work (or at least they did for me).
To upgrade, simply type the following from a root console (The old version of SA will be removed automatically):
<code>wget http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/spamassassin/spamassassin_3.2.3-1_all.deb
dpkg -i spamassassin_3.2.3-1_all.deb
</code>
If you haven't discovered the joys of Debian, I'm sure you can find a SpamAssassin 3.2.x package for your distro if you hunt hard enough.
I found the new version to be slightly slower, but more accurate, than the old version.
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