Not long after Apple fixed one 1970-related iPhone glitch, a second one appears to be at work. A number of iPhone and iPad owners are tweeting screengrabs of ghost emails arriving from 1st January 1970. The emails have no sender, subject or content, and cannot be deleted, reports the Telegraph.
The good news is that this glitch doesn’t do any harm. The date is simply the Unix equivalent of zero, so the iOS Mail app would default to this if for some reason the correct date and time were missing, as one Reddit user explained …
The way it works is that the date is stored as a continuously increasing collection of over a billion seconds (ignores timezone conversions, easy for computers to handle in binary). This is typically called Unix time or Epoch time. For example, the current time right now (in this format) is about 1.45 billion. Like I said, it’s easy for a computer to handle this number to store the date in binary, especially on a 64-bit device. Well, if it’s 1.45 billion right now, what’s 0? The answer is January 1st, 1970, at midnight.
Most (but not all) of those affected seem to experience the issue when changing timezone.
Quitting the email app and then resetting the device (holding down the power and Home buttons until the Apple logo appears) seems to remove the ghost emails and stop them reappearing.
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Can’t wait for new years’ eve of 2038!
Seriously, I’m experiencing this as well. No biggie, I’ll simply keep on swiping those to the left and be done with it.
I had this happen, but oddly enough the year was 1969 instead.
That seems…impossible. Are you by any chance to the East of Murray Hill, New Jersey? I wonder if that could result in a ‘negative time count’.
I actually have seen the 1969 emails as well before. Did not think more about it – just deleting the empty emails. I travel between continents now and then..
That just means you’re not in the GMT time zone. UNIX time zero is the midnight starting the 1st of January 1970 in Coordinated Universal Time, which on that date was exactly the same as Greenwich Mean Time. So if you’re in e.g. North or South America, a few hours behind, you were still in 1969 when Greenwich reached 1970, so that timestamp means very late 1969, not 1970.
Thank you for explaining that one.
Interesting coincidence.
Ray Tomlinson, the person who invented e-mail and selected the @ symbol for addressing passed away this weekend.
theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/ray-tomlinson-email-inventor-and-selector-of-symbol-dies-aged-74
Jim Kimsey, the co-founder, first chairman and former CEO of AOL, died last week. I’m starting to feel old.
I’ve had this happen in Mail back as far as at least iOS 6. Quitting Mail.app and power cycling the phone usually does the trick. Don’t usually need to hard restart.
Same here. Naturally upon receiving my first email from 1970 I wrote straight back warning about the energy crisis and about the Iranian Revolution, telling them not to be so worried about the cold war and asking that they please save a few episodes of Doctor Who, but I didn’t get a reply.
Ok, that comment deserves more than a like! Bravo! Oddly, just discussing WiFi/Router names with my sister. I don’t know what this mean (I’ve never watched, but she does), but you’ll get the reference…
┓┏ 凵 =╱⊿┌┬┐
Hopefully that isn’t an insult!
iSRS i actually just watched that episode yesterday lol. Quite the coincidence you mentioned it right now. Basically, there is a villain in Doctor Who called “The Intelligence” which grows on the thoughts on humans. It groomed a child into adulthood, and had her develop a wifi network connected to cyborgs, which when you connect to, the cyborgs/wifi hubs would “download” your conciousness onto a computer. All very strange but a good episode. It is season 7 episode 6 I believe
The line you posted was the Wifi network’s SSID in the episode.
Why is there a mail from 2001 on the right side picture ?
People seem to be reporting some other dates too – like 1969 in this thread.
someone in another post said the most sensible thing. UNIX time is equivalent to GMT, so people in the states would be 5-10 hours behind UNIX time, thereby creating a negative UNIX timestamp resulting in something like 2:00pm to 7:00pm on the 31st December 1969
00:00:00 +00:00 on 1/1/1970 is the UNIX reference date; 00:00:00 +00:00 on 1/1/2001 is the NSDate reference date. The different emails probably came to different inboxes, at least one of which generates its display NSDates with [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceReferenceDate:] and one with [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970:], whichever the underlying protocol made more sensible.
I’ve had this issue for years and it was occurring multiple times on a daily basis. No one in our IT group could figure it out or fix. I eventually had to move to the IOS Outlook program which hasn’t had any of these issues. Interesting they are focusing on time zones as I don’t travel a lot, but I do get a ton (200+) emails a day on my work account.
I got this e-mail from October 26, 1985…
Yesterday I noticed a folder on my iMac that was dated 1969.
Last week I imported a video from a Dropbox folder into OSX Photos and the date was set to 1/1/1970. So I checked the metadata in the video which was the correct date, sometime last week. I didn’t think any of it and simply changed the date in Photos, but now I’m starting to see a pattern. Thing is, how to fix it?
It would have been so much better storyline if some had cryptic messages 👻 Like ”Why did you Scew up the Mac OSX System so badly?” The mounts and National Parks SUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKK ‼️ “Bring back good paying Manufacturing jobs to the US, You don’t need to stash your Millions” “I will Avenge All Responsible Owwwwwwwhhhhhhhhh” 😱😱
I turned off mail by swiping it up in the multitasking pane, then did a hard restart. THe mails are still there. Also, it is not possible to delete them. There is no bubble on the left side to check in editing mode to enable you to select the messages to be deleted.
I was plagued by 4 No Sender emails on my iPhone 5 for several weeks. I tried all the suggestions I could find on the internet but nothing worked to delete these emails. I went to an AT&T store and the tech checked my phone and noticed that the 4 emails were “flagged!” He unflagged them and I deleted the email account from my phone, rebooted (both buttons pressed) and then added the email account back to my phone. IT WORKED!!!! No more No Sender emails on my phone. Hope this helps someone else!