How can someone change the date sent on an e-mail?

Question

Most of the spam in my inbox has the year of 2035 on it. This is still 29 years away.

Just curious, that is all.

Answer 1

The date is set on the email server from which the email is sent. Unless you have access to the email server, which you don't in your case, you cannot change the date.

Answer 2

Every email has a set of "headers" which contain things like: what email address to show in the "from" section, the subject, content, etc. There is also an optional "date" field which many email programs use to display and sort emails by date.

It happens all the time where people (especially senders of spam) just plain make up the information in their headers. This is how phishing scams can work: they can fake as though their email is from "[e-mail]" to seem more credible.

There are some fields in the header which can not just be changed. For example, the "Received" date fields are set as the email is passed from server-to-server on the way from sender to recipient. Using this information, some email programs are able to provide a "ignore strange dates" feature where they flag or ignore emails where the "Date:" field does not make sense with the "Received" date fields.

If this interests you, check out more about SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smtp

Answer 3

It's fairly trivial, the spammers simply use programs which write a false date on them and your email program believes what the date on the email says.

Answer 4

There are ways to do that.
Just change the date on the computer.

Answer 5

report spam because u know and u are sure it`s spam.

Answer 6

yes u know its spam so why u want to be curious on it forget it.