I just had occasion to check my yahoo email account’s spam folder to see if a message I was expecting had accidentally been shipped there, and I ran into something that irritated me enough to start this thread. Messages are listed in chronological order, with the newest first. Some spammer (specializing in mortgage refinancing) has figured out how to make all his emails arrive with the date 2038, so they get put at the top of the list. So seeing as how the message I wanted would have arrived way back in 2006, I had to delete about 250 copies of the future spam in order just to get back to today’s date. And there was no message there.
So darn you, spammer! Darn you to heck with a rusty butter knife!
If that gets common, it then becomes an easy way to identify spam. So messages from more than 24 hours in the future would get automatically deleted. (You need a buffer to cope with people in New Zealand writing to people in California, which can be 19 hours behind).
Well, yahoo’s already filtering them out into my spam folder, and they automatically get deleted after a few days…unless, that is, the date change fools the delete fuction…hmm, hadn’t thought of that. It’s exceedingly rare for me to even open that folder, so it’s not a huge problem. Except on those occasions when I do.
While not quite the same thing, I once got a spam in 1999 that asked me if I was ready for the Y2000K bug. I had to admit that my computer wasn’t equipped to handle the year 2,000,000.