[JV153]

E-mails sent with dates in the future. A few years ago (2007) we received two e-mails with received dates in 2013 and 2017. My question is - where does the receive date get set, I ask the computer programmers. E-mail client was Microsoft Outlook Express.

This was he first of an unusual series of events that occurred personally - this one not being particularly so as it just seems like a glitch in a computer system.

[Tanada]

Most software works off of the date set in the computer so if someone tells their computer the year is 2017 that is the date stamped on all the emails it sends. Spammer sometimes do this because most receiving software organizes received email by date and setting their date way above normal makes their spam appear at the top of the list.

[Keith_McClary]

E-mails sent with dates in the future. A few years ago (2007) we received two e-mails with received dates in 2013 and 2017. My question is - where does the receive date get set, I ask the computer programmers.

You can also "spoof" the From address. This worked for me just now:
http://www.anonymailer.net/
(Use an existing domain name for the "from" address).

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spoofing

[joewp]

Also, if you use your email client's "View message source" function, you can see all the smtp headers in the message, which tell you where it was really sent from and when. You can't spoof those.

[JV153]

Joewp, yes, I know. The e-mails were from people we know and arrived from two different geographical locations. That's why it was odd. The e-mails were deleted a long time ago.

[KaiserJeep]

If this happened in 1999, 2000, any leap year between 1999 and 2010, or 2010, then you are probably talking about some flavor of Y2K software bug. There are a whole slew of problems, most trace back to the fact that many computers store years using only two BCD (binary coded decimal) digits. The last major one of these problems was in 2010, when Microsoft Windows SMS had a bug where as 2009 rolled over into 2010, it represented 2010 as 2016. This was the so-called Y2K+10 bug.

Interestingly enough, the biggest Y2K bug is still to come. UNIX stores a date code as a signed 32-bit integer, and in the year 2038 this value will exceed 2 raised to the 31st power minus 1, and overflow the 32-bit space. The best way to solve this is to replace all your 32-bit computers with 64-bit computers before the "Y2K38" bug occurs.

[Timo]

Stupid me! I thought those e-mails really were from the future! I kept trying to reply to the sender to get some info in which stocks to buy today, all to no avail. Stupid me. And broke, too!

[dolanbaker]

My 97 year old great grandson just emailed me to say "sell" they weren’t around when I was born!