On Sunday 05 July 2009 08:57:42 Tamar Raine wrote:
> I was about to delete the 238 spam in my spam folder and then I saw
> something VERY STRANGE!  many of the dates were like;
>
> 1/18/38  and all those apear to be sent at the same time.  talk about a
> time warp! deri, peter any idea what this is?
>
>
> Thanks,
> Tamar

Hi Mags,

Spammers want their mail to be at the top of your inbox and since most people 
sort their inbox on date its a good idea to use a date in the future.

The actual date you quoted rang a bell and I found:-

"32 bit time_t values have a max: Mon Jan 18 20:14:07 2038 

The result above comes from epoch seconds = 2147483647.

This is largest positive value a 32 bit signed integer supports. If you add 
one to that value and then display it as a date/time value you get the 
earliest date your system supports".

Yes, it is nerdy!!!

So the spammers either used the max value for date or your email reader didn't 
"understand" the date format used and defaulted to the maximum.

This date is sort of the next Y2K, although the "fix" is much easier (just 
recompile with time_t defined as 64 bit rather than 32). I predict a lot of 
contractors making a lot of money in 18 years time!!

Cheers

Deri

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