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:
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:
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.