Posted: 1/23/2016 11:23:58 PM EDT
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I don't know if I should be calling ghost busters or what.
A good friend of ours husband died last September. Yesterday she started getting emails from "No Sender" and there was "No Content". The date of the email was 12/31/1969. She deleted them and they came right back. She also received them in two of her email accounts. Today she realized the date was the day she moved in with her husband. She is a little shaken up. Is someone fucking with her? |
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12/31/1969 is sometimes printed when a computer system's clock is screwed up, or a record in a database has no time stamp associated with it.
Without getting too technical, a lot of programmers store dates as the number of seconds that have elapsed since 1/1/1970. If a date is missing or the clock is screwy, the system will pick one second before then, and you get 12/31/1969. So whatever server is sending those emails probably has a clock that needs to be set properly. |
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It's just as likely to be a jacked up mail server or messed up email program as it is someone screwing with her. 12/31/1969 12:00:01 is the "First second" in Unix called "Epoch" time. So that date is one day before "beginning of time" on the main operating system that runs email servers (and pretty much everything else.) I bet if you looked at the time stamp on the email headers it would be right then. (More nerd stuff about it here.) It's probably a coincidence. Without more details, it's impossible to tell though. Email program? Computer operating system? Is she prone to getting viruses? |
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iPad, iPhone?
Try hard resetting holding home and power button. It may need to be done a few times. If that doesn't work... Close the app - double tap the Home button to reveal the multitask bar, then tap the email app there and hold it until it wiggles, then delete the app. Go to Settings - Mails, Contacts, Calendars. Tap your email account and turn off Mail. Then turn off your iPad, turn it on again and enable Mail in Settings - ... |
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OK, I get the date thing. She is getting the email through Charter, at home, and Gmail on her Iphone. They have both dissapeared and returned multiple times. It just disappeared from her Gmail 2 minutes ago. I tried to open and forward it to me but it would not open on her phone.
She misses her husband and wants this to be a miracle. 
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Quoted: OK, I get the date thing. She is getting the email through Charter, at home, and Gmail on her Iphone. They have both dissapeared and returned multiple times. It just disappeared from her Gmail 2 minutes ago. I tried to open and forward it to me but it would not open on her phone. She misses her husband and wants this to be a miracle. Charter email sucks ass. I would not be surprised at all if they were fucking up to make this happen. You cannot guarantee that whatever she says she's seeing, is actually what is happening. I can sit right next to my GF, and watch her mess with her phone that she barely knows how to operate, and she'll tell me the exact opposite of what is going on with the phone than what we just saw, that we are both sitting there watching. Take screen shots of it. Also, she could be infected with something (people who don't know about email do that) and what you really need to be doing is resetting to factory default on the phone, and running anti virus scan on the computer. (Back up any photos or whatnot on the phone first.) |
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Quoted:
The Y2K38 crisis is going to make Y2K look like a cake walk. 
Quoted:
Quoted:
12/31/1969 is sometimes printed when a computer system's clock is screwed up, or a record in a database has no time stamp associated with it.... The Y2K38 crisis is going to make Y2K look like a cake walk.
Yes, yes it is. |