Friday, September 24, 2010

Ghost in the Machine?

Last night I received an email to one of my accounts dated 2003 from someone I knew then. It was the second time I'd got that email (first time was in 03), but when I replied the email bounced back because the address no longer existed. Oddly, this morning the email was gone, and only the mailer daemon rebound was there, but the text of the actual note was gobbledegook.


Any thoughts? Or does the intertubes really never forget...

2 comments:

lichtik said...

Typically, the date field is set to the date and time of the sending user/computer. If the sending computer has a wrong date and time your email client will (likely) display the same wrong date and time. Note that like most fields of an email message the date and time can be spoofed. Some email clients make this hard to do but none make it impossible.

Polyorchnid Octopunch said...

Actually, I'm more inclined to believe that it came from one of the millions of machines out there that are participating in spam sending botnets. Among other things, a LOT of those are actually very poorly written, they often change dates etc in the hopes of generating bounces which will result in more spams being sent (the process is known as a backscatter exploitation), and my guess is that the gobbledegook is probably in a language that uses a double-byte character set.