[ale] OT:email

[Scott Castaline]

Jim Sculley wrote:
> 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?
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>>   
> 
> 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.
> 
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> 
I did run into a thread from back in 2004 on T'Bird 1.5 or maybe 1.0.5 
where compacting folders eliminated this. I found that I had to open the 
corresponding file for the folder and deleting the contents in a text 
editor, was the only way that it would eliminate these messages. I 
suppose I could just do a null > filename that corresponds to folder 
from xterm cli would effectively do the same but I was in the file so I 
just ctrl A and delete did the same.