These sorts of changes are not designed to deliberately break things. It's possible something was loaded into the ruleset incorrectly, it's also possible whatever SMTP server or scanners you use don't comply with the RFCs for SMTP and some sort of attack has been developed using similar methods and this caused a rule to be added. Could be other issues as well.
If you didn't work with support already, you need to. That way the issue can be logged and sent back to the Snort team for analysis.