Old dates on spam - years old

[rfry965]

Hello,

I've tried searching the forums for the issue of "back dates" etc, but seem to only come across discussions of spam that is a few days or months old and it seems cannot be reported.

But, in the past couple of months the few spams that do manage to make it through my yahoo account have a date going back years. I never open them, just get through my inbox (over 200 messages in it usually that I'm too lazy to file) and realize I still show 1 unread message. If I go to the oldest page of my inbox, sure enough there it is. Some spam e-mail dated back 2, 3, or 4 years.

The topic is what's been going around lately the OEM crap, download Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop etc. I have not tried to post anything, nor have I gone in to the message. It would seem that it's not something that can be reported because of it being "too old". I just figure there is a new old game in town to get past spam filters.

If there is something of use I can post please let me know.

Rosemary

[StevenUnderwood]

I've tried searching the forums for the issue of "back dates" etc, but seem to only come across discussions of spam that is a few days or months old and it seems cannot be reported.

But, in the past couple of months the few spams that do manage to make it through my yahoo account have a date going back years. I never open them, just get through my inbox (over 200 messages in it usually that I'm too lazy to file) and realize I still show 1 unread message. If I go to the oldest page of my inbox, sure enough there it is. Some spam e-mail dated back 2, 3, or 4 years.

Which date is used to present to the user and sort on is different depending on the application in use. Just because the date you are being shown is years old, do not think the spam is too old to report. SpamCop uses the Received lines to determine when the message was sent. The date you are seeing could easily be forged. The date in the received lines are based on your ISP's mail server, and should be acurate.

You could try to submit one for reporting and paste the tracking URL if this does not answer your question. Then we can be more specific, but would likely also need to know what email software you are using.

[rfry965]

Which date is used to present to the user and sort on is different depending on the application in use. Just because the date you are being shown is years old, do not think the spam is too old to report. SpamCop uses the Received lines to determine when the message was sent. The date you are seeing could easily be forged. The date in the received lines are based on your ISP's mail server, and should be acurate.

You could try to submit one for reporting and paste the tracking URL if this does not answer your question. Then we can be more specific, but would likely also need to know what email software you are using.

Hello again,

Okay in looking at the full headers (in yahoo mail) I see now where the received dates are actually the 8th of May 2007, & the 9th of May 2007. To add a level of complexity, most of the spam I receive comes through our volunteer fire department "board" e-mail address which was harvested off the website a long time ago when it was up there in plain text. Hopefully we will have a new website in the next couple of months and the mistakes made with putting up plain text e-mail addresses will not be repeated. But that's another story.

I was reading up on "munging" because I'd prefer to submit this without the e-mail address of our board and the personal e-mail of one of our officers. Is there an acceptable way of doing this?

Thanks for explaining how the dates work.

Rosemary

[Farelf]

I was reading up on "munging" because I'd prefer to submit this without the e-mail address of our board and the personal e-mail of one of our officers. Is there an acceptable way of doing this?

Hi Rosemary. Under the "Preferances" tab on your reporting page take the "Report handling options" link and go down to "spam Munging" and select the "Obscure identifying information" option then try pasting in a spam (full headers and body) and submit it. See if the result is satisfactory (you will see the munging in the headers the parser has been working on). If not, cancel the report and come back with your observations. If it is okay, just send the report and you are in business. You can't (properly speaking) report on something sent to someone else's personal email address at your domain - but there would be nothing wrong in using such spam to experiment with as long as you only cancel it.

[turetzsr]

Hi, Rosemary!

<snip>

Okay in looking at the full headers (in yahoo mail) I see now where the received dates are actually the 8th of May 2007, & the 9th of May 2007.

<snip>

...Some time ago, I asked Yahoo to address this. Other than a couple of requests for clarification, I have heard nothing from them (and don't expect to -- you get what you pay for [and I use the free version of Yahoo!Mail] <g>).