[ale] OT:email

[Jim Sculley]

Scott Castaline wrote:
> I opened my mail folder in a text editor and found references within the 
> message to crushxmail.asp which google seemed to indicate a possible 
> "email address trap", and then I googled 12/31/1969 and it went to a few 
> issues related to Y2K and Winblowz. I found the only way that I could 
> totally get rid of these emails was to delete the trash folder once I 
> confirmed that these messages were in the the trash folder. Otherwise it 
> just would pop up into the inbox or junk folders. Is it possible that 
> the emails are still around from back then and can now affect Linux 
> users? Or is the Y2K issue still around?
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>   

The date represents time just before the Unix 'epoch': Jan 1, 1970.  
Your average computer is counting seconds (and much finer grained 
values) since the epoch.  You can see this raw value with the 'date' 
command and a format specifier:

[jim at littlebit ~]$ date +%s
1226179364

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

An email with a 12/31/1969 timestamp is probably just a malformed 
timestamp value, parsed to the default date 1 second prior to the 
epoch.  The message is likely SPAM and may have the timestamp set 
deliberately, to exploit some problem in Thunderbird making it difficult 
to delete (speculation).  I know I had one or two of these 12/31/1969 
messages in the past, but I don't remember how I got rid of them.


Jim S.