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Has anyone else noticed something weird/wrong about how the "new" MSU mail marks email subject lines for spam? We were having a discussion in the office today and I remarked on the fact that I had not seen a single message with *****SPAM***** in its subject line since the new mail system was put in place. That didn't seem right, so I started investigating. I logged in to mail.msu.edu, which I rarely use, normally using Outlook 2003 for IMAP access to all my mail. I did a search and found a message from April that did indeed have *****SPAM***** in the subject line. While looking at the message list, the first odd thing I noticed was that the subject did not start with the asterisks and had the actual subject repeated, like this: RE: <https://mail.msu.edu/imp/message.php?mailbox=INBOX&index=38457> Old Hardrock Question, *****SPAM***** RE: Old Hardrock Question Having the spam marking inserted this way contradicts the Techbase articles about spam processing, which have statements such as: "Suspected spam is marked and delivered to the Inbox with "*****SPAM*****" prefixing the subject line of the message." I proceeded to open the message on mail.msu.edu and noticed something even stranger--now in message view instead of mailbox view, the subject line at the top of the message window no longer contained the *****SPAM**** marking at all, instead being the normal: Subject: RE: Old Hardrock Question I went back to the mailbox view to check and sure enough, it still had *****SPAM***** in the subject. How could webmail be showing two different subject lines depending on how I looked at a message? To check further, I went to Outlook and found the message in my IMAP mailbox, which also showed no *****SPAM***** marking, regardless of whether I was looking at the mailbox view or the message itself. So, in Outlook I viewed the message headers, which showed the following (some lines deleted): Subject: RE: Old Hardrock Question Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 07:06:04 -0700 Thread-Topic: Old Hardrock Question From: Store CustomerService <[log in to unmask]> To: "Chris Wolf" <[log in to unmask]> X-Spam-Level: ***** X-Spam-Report: All incoming messages to mail.msu.edu are analyzed for typical spam characteristics. See http://techbase.msu.edu/article.asp?id=11475 for additional report information. Content analysis details: (5.8 points, 5.0 required) pts rule name description ---- ---------------------- -------------------------------------------------- 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message 4.0 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_32 BODY: HTML: images with 2800-3200 bytes of words 1.8 MIME_QP_LONG_LINE RAW: Quoted-printable line longer than 76 chars X-Spam-Score: 5.8 Subject: *****SPAM***** RE: Old Hardrock Question Notice in particular that there are two Subject: lines, the first and last lines above, shown in bold. It appears that SpamAssassin instead of replacing the Subject line as it used to do, is now adding a second Subject line with the *****SPAM***** prefix. Based on the examples above, having two subject lines clearly does not work well with many email clients, including mail.msu.edu's own webmail interface. Did anyone else notice this unannounced change in the new mail system behavior? I'm also curious as to how other client software is handling the double subject lines.