Is this just a glitch with email?

Happy Halloween!!!!!


I've asked my hubby and my cousin and best friend and just a few others on what this might be or even mean..if anything...or it's just a glitch.

I was checking my email earlier and I scrolled down and this email caught my eyes...it's highlighted in grey and has a blue dot next to it.

I snapped a screenshot as soon as I noticed it. It just has the date 12/31/69. It has no sender info, no subject matter and it says below it that 'this message has no content' and over to the side it says 'no message selected' even though I clicked on it.

So after I snap the screenshot, I scroll up, then scroll back down and the email is gone. I looked in my other files and folders and it was no where. Glitch??

My hubby said, glitch or it's from 2069... Hmmm

My cousin said this just further makes him question that we are living in a computer simulated world and that projected realities are happening simultaneously....hmmm

My best friend said she thinks that 'they' just want us to think that computers are newish when they've been around a lot longer than we think... Hmmm...

All very interesting..
What do other people of ATS think I was wondering? Just a glitch?

Peace and love
-nat the blue eyed cat-

I have experienced those weird dates too, they are pretty normal, sometimes I get mail from the future. Its bit weird that you get e-mail without sender and content though

badly formatted email - probably spam...you can forge pretty much everything on an email so i could send you one from any email address you like and with whatever time i decided to set the clock to...if i wanted to i could send you an email from the 24th century pretending to be captain kirk asking for people to leave the orion slave girls for him

reply to post by natalia


Well its certainly something i have never experienced or heard of. Maybe it is a glitch. But why the strange date?....Weird .. I just usually get Nigerian princes asking for my bank account details

reply to post by Maxatoria


See I didn't know that. I appreciate your info.
I asked a friend who I knew was smart with computers, but he never answered me.
Thanks

reply to post by Thebel


Yeah a friend told me he gets emails from ten years ago... Sometimes. Pretty neat if ya ask me how much stinkin storage there is...

Thanks for your reply

That date is Unix "time zero"...

"The Unix timestamp is defined in seconds since the Unix Epoch, otherwise known as January 1, 1970 at 0:00:00 UTC...

...The concept of the Unix Epoch as the basis for time is causing some issues as we get deeper into the new millennium. For 32-bit systems, such as this server and hundreds of thousands (likely millions) of other computerized devices out there, time is finite. The systems will not be able to handle the large integer required to store the date based on the Epoch. When Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 UTC rolls around, timestamps will rollover—to a value that equates to Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 GMT."

Read more: www.rachaelarnold.com...


All pretty confusing, but I wouldnt worry about it at all. Just something to do with the programming of time in computers and what not or something. Kind of like Y2K. Not exactly sure why it would randomly appear in an email but from what i gather is pretty common and nothing to worry about.

reply to post by TheDoctor46


Oh the dreaded emails for bank info... Those are horrid.

Glitch or spam this email must be

reply to post by homeslice


Wow, very informative sir or ma'am. I appreciate your explanation. It is a wee bit confusing but I seem to understand. Thanks for the link.

reply to post by natalia


I dont really know much about it, just have heard about that date and it being related to the Unix timestamp.

I just wanted to find out a bit more and went snoopng. Seems to be a common problem especially on mobile devices. cant seem to find a exact reason for getting it though. Could be some sort of spam or something- but I assume this error could occur from a wide range of things as 12/31/1969 is the default error date in Unix.

reply to post by homeslice


Hmm .. I'm on an iPad...so I mean I know it's a wee bit like a mobile device.
That email disappeared though, I didn't push delete. It was strange though... At least to me

reply to post by natalia


Specifically, the date "12/31/69" results from a date function that is expecting a UNIX timestamp receiving an invalid value. UNIX time (or POSIX time, also called UNIX epoch time) is basically a way of marking time using the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch, which is 00:00:00 UTC (GMT) on January 1st, 1970. The reason you get "12/31/69" instead of "01/01/70" is the factoring in of the local time zone which anywhere west of the Prime Meridian is UTC -1 to UTC -12 hours.

Here's a UNIX time converter

reply to post by theantediluvian


Thanks for your reply...home slice explained that was the problem. Which is still pretty neat to me

Have a nice night ^-^~~~