The Future is Now!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Today, June 8, I opened up my spam folder from Yahoo mail at 7:30 am to check for a newsletter mailing that often gets kicked out as spam. I noticed that the date and time on the latest piece of spam I received is June 9, at 1:53 am. And then I check the previous 12 messages dated for June 8, and realize that the time stamps for when I received them are all in the future…ranging from 8 am to 11:30 pm.

So now I know why it is so hard to eliminate spam. The spammers are obviously operating from an alternate universe that is at least a day and a half ahead of ours! No wonder we can’t catch them! They have technology we can only dream of!

Sounds a bit like the plot for that new Sandra Bullock movie, but mere hours ahead instead of years!

2

George Allen? Is that you?

3

So no explanation from any brilliant Doper?

4

Large parts of email headers can be forged. This includes the time that the email is first generated.

Look at the whole header in plain text. There should be a few lines of time stamps for the mail servers involved that would give the true time.

The advantage to spammers is that their message will be at the “top” of the list.

There can also be incorrectly configured servers involved. I had a machine once that sent mail a day “behind”. sendmail config files are, umm, peculiar things.