DATE_IN_FUTURE weirdness

[Andrew Daviel]

We have SpamAssassin 3.2.5 running with spamd, and a milter with sendmail 
8.13.8.

We allow users to relay with authentication on the submission port on 
both our main MTA and on a secondary outbound MTA running Postfix.
I.e. laptop users can have either of these set as their default SMTP 
server and they should be able to send mail whether they are onsite, at 
home etc. etc.

I noticed that sometimes I get spurious DATE_IN_FUTURE_96_XX tags when 
sending direct to the main MTA (the one with SA) with Alpine or 
Thunderbird. But not when I try "by hand" with netcat.
The mail headers all look good - I can even paste the Alpine headers into 
netcat and get a different answer.

I tried dumping received-headers in SpamAssassin to a file and they seem 
to be getting mangled somehow. Apart from a spurious date a month in the 
past, I seem to lose 
some lines of Received header relating to authenticated-bits and TLS 
(which I am using to whitelist authenticated mail), so that mail scored 
with RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL might get flagged as spam.
If I run SA on a saved message, there is no problem, and the Received 
header is only mangled inside SA, not in the message saved to disk.

If I send via the Postfix MTA, there is no problem. And it does not 
happen with all mail agents - I see many whitelist tags for 
authenticated-bits in the log.

I may just upgrade SA and see if it goes away, but I wondered if anyone 
else had seen anything like this.


--
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376  (Pacific Time)
Network Security Manager