Everyone gets spam, but do you get time-travelling spam? I do.
I download my e-mail using Eudora. Eudora puts all the new e-mail in my inbox at the end of the list, and puts a dot in front of it that means “unread”. So, I go to the top of this “unread” list and read the e-mail, deleting what I don’t need or want to keep, and keeping what I do want to keep in the inbox. Occasionally, I’ll go through the inbox and delete the old messages that I once needed, but really don’t need to keep anymore.
That’s when I discover the time-travelling spam.
As I’m cleaning out the inbox, I’ll find a brand-spanking new, unread spam! I think, why the heck didn’t I delete this when I got it? and I delete it. I think it was a brainfart on my part.
Well, one day, as I downloaded my e-mail, I saw the time-travelling spam in action. I don’t know if the spam is back-dated on purpose, or if it just takes a longer-than-usual time to get to me, but this spam, dated yesterday, doesn’t get stuck with all the unread stuff (dated today) at the end of the list–it jumps up in the list to nestle in with anything I kept from yesterday! And then it waits, like a dead mouse on the doorstep, until I have an excuse to go looking for an e-mail from yesterday. That’s when I discover it. Ewwww.
So, does this happen to anybody else? Is this some new spammer trick (I can’t see how it helps–I still delete it one way or another) or have I discovered a hole in the fabric of space-time that spam can slip through?
It’s like having a little time machine and finding dino droppings in it.
That happened to me a lot when I had a free internet e-mail service. I would get a message saying I have five new messages, and only see three or four. The other ones were way back in my inbox, sometimes actually dated from more than a year ago! Sheesh.
If it is intneitonal, I don’t see the point. SPAM is less likely to get read if it is further back in the inbox, I would thin,.
Yeah, I’m always getting those time-travelling spam e-mails myself. Why, I just found this one in my in-box:
GENTLEMEN, LENGTHEN YOUR MASCULINE ENDOWMENT WITH PROFESSOR SWEENY’S PATENTED ELECTRO-TRONICAL PENILE ENHANCEMENT CORSET [STOP] AMAZING MEDICAL DISCOVERY OF THE AGE! [STOP] IT IS WELL-KNOWN THAT BOTH DEBUTANT AND STRUMPET ALIKE DESIRE INCHES! INCHES! INCHES! [STOP] ALSO BELIEVED TO ALLIEVIATE THE EFFECTS OF CONSUPTION! [STOP] CONTACT SWEENY’S ELECTRO-TRONICAL NOVELTIES BOUTIQUE, DENVER, COLORADO [STOP]
Oh, wow! Nope, none of my time-travelling spam have actually been about time travel. He’d be that much closer to the secret, I think, if he could get his spam to travel back in time!
Yup, I’ve been getting this kind of spam for some time now. I’m thinking that the idiot spammers try to back-date (or even wierder, POST-date) their messages by resetting their local clocks or whatever. Forgetting, of course, that the true time and date of the message will be revealed by a quick parse of the headers.
I always love submitting spam that’s dated 1/1/2008 to my spam reporting service. It’s comforting to see that the software is smarter than the spammers and figures out the real date lickety split.
Bummer, I thought this was going to be a message about something similar to this incredibly strange email I received some time ago (the email was present-dated, and not from the future or past):
DATE: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 04:44:50
From: davemize @ earthlink
Hello,
If you are a reliable supplier of the below equipment I am going to need the following:
A mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator # 52 4350a series wrist watch with memory adapter.
The special 23200 series time transducing capacitor with built in temporal displacement.
While these time pieces normally go between $5,000-$7,000 a piece, I am having a hard time finding a reliable supplier.
Teleport to me within the next 48 earth hours and I will pay $40,000 2002 US cash.
Please only reply if you are reliable. Send a (SEPARATE) email to
me at: Tomnwrr @ aol
I do love getting spam from 1969, though. I seem to get a lot of those, which just proves to me that penis-enlarging technology isn’t any better now than it was back then!
Yes, I get time traveling spam too. I hate it. I noticed it the same way you did, with my Yahoo e-mail account. I haven’t noticed this with Hotmail yet though.
I use Outlook 2000. I make sure to open all of my new email messages first thing. If, after opening all of the new messages I see that Inbox is bolded with a (1) next to it, then I know that somewhere farther up the list is still an email with a non-current date that has not been opened yet. Occasionally this happens with legitimate email, but I have never seen spam try to sneak in this way. Since I use Mailwasher, I catch all the spam there before it even gets to my Outlook.