While not everyone syncs their desktop PC with an NTP server, you’d expect people to at least have their PC clock set to the correct month!
Checking my imap folders this evening I came across a gem – maybe a rough gem, but perfect to illustrate my point.
Some bright spark requested a service, however, as their PC’s date is set to two months into the future it’s quite hard to see when the email was actually sent!
The only way I could see when the email was actually received was by checking the raw headers!!
This probably isn’t as big a problem for users of Outlook, since it seems to sort mail by date / time received, but it’s really annoying if you’re using Thunderbird (or a lot of other email clients)
Brilliant! I heard before that hackers etc would look for the NTP or time server first when compromising as system. They would then set the time to a year or two in the future, and this would make it easier to erase the entries from the syslog servers etc…
Perhaps this is what happened to your poor email message 🙂
I received an email like this recently and the evil in me thought it could be a sly way to make sure an email got noticed.
Most (I’d estimate 99%) of the messages I receive with significantly incorrect dates (more than a week out) is spam, so all of it goes in the bin. Good luck with that mail Alan 🙂
@Brian – rofl
@Alan – it would just get you added to the “muppet” list
@Michele Is that before or after you buy my Viagra 🙂
@Alan – down boy 🙂