Email from the Future!

I now regularly receive email that seems to originate from approximately 30 years into the future. The years 2036 through 2038 seem the most popular.

Here's the message headers from one such email:

If you think about it - it's pretty obvious. Many people have their email program setup to sort messages by date. An email timestamped with the year 2038 will be automatically sorted up to the top of their inbox. Considering that the message may be competing with 300 other messages (spam and not) for a user's eyeballs - coming up on top may present a major edge.

The trick is certainly easy enough to perform. Most email headers can be readily forged. In general, SMTP servers just pass on headers as they were given to them. Faking a bogus date is not significantly different from forging the sender's address.

Much of the future spam I've received recently is also empty. Unlike most empty spam, these messages literally contain no content. As I've hypothesized elsewhere, I suspect these messages may be caused by malfunctioning networks of zombie systems.

So what can be done about it?

For once, SpamButcher can now recognize messages like these. An email sent any time after the year 2036 will get some extra-special scrutiny from the spam blocker. Yes, if someone is still using SpamButcher 1.9 in the year 2036 they may be at risk of missing some email. However, I'm sure we'll have shipped 2.0 by then. Besides, I'm not sure where I'll be in 30 years from now. 30 years ago the personal computer didn't even exist.

Email servers do know when they received a message. It shouldn't be too difficult to add code to detect an "anomalous" claim about when an email was originally sent. Perhaps messages claiming to be from more than a few days into the future should be bounced?

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