467842 - Junk (spam) caught bears ridiculous/erroneous receive date

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 166254

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[John L. Jacobs]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: 2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.080814-1236 : Service Pack 3)

Thunderbird 2.0.0.18 (20081105)
Daily spam caught by Spamassasin bears, approx 2 to 4 msgs bear years date of 1976 but header (viewing sourceof the actual msg shows date of 3609. One instance main window showed year to be 1974 but header shows date of 3607. Result is that sort puts these last in main junk window: easy to spot.  

Not sure but my analysis is that since the Date info is actually part of the mail body, the 3607 or 3609 date is entered by the spammer in the body and then the main mail window does not know what do with it and shows the arrival date as 1974 or 1976 respectively given those dates are unrelated to the system clock which know the real date year is 2008.

Examination of the header's first Received: report --- being the last one in the reported list --- indicates the actual and _correct_ time that the spammer sent the email: not the erroneous year shown in the main window and different erroneous year shown in the msg itself.

This is clearly a spam issue and never appears with bone fide mail.

This is _not_ a major functioning issue since it appears in spam which is caught and my take is that it is created by the sender. Seems rather stupid because almost any spam filter would catch mail altered like this and send it to the Junk folder. Curious that the main window shows an entirely different year than the msg itself.  Received: headers are not created by the spammer but rather by the SMTP server so upon examination of the headers it is simple to know when the spam was actually sent if one has a need to know, but it this does interfere with the sort order of trained spam in the Junk folder.  Since I do not mark spam as 'Read', I can know when it actually appeared despite the fact that it is stored in the Junk folder as a past msg:  that is the sort order is handled correctly despite the date being false.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. None except simply check spam for false positives.
2. Falsely dated spam is always a false positive.
3.



Since the dates indicated are ridiculous and properly identified as Junk it would seem that at least the date year shown in the main window should agree with the date shown in the msg body.

Comment 1

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

We trust that the email has the correct sending date.

Besides, matching based on years would fail around December 31.

Bug 166254 adds the Received header in the display.

Comment 2

[ssp]

Exactly!!! I pointed the same in my  bug  report No 46620.
See what i wrote
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For better visibility, spammers would set futuristic date, say of year 2015 and
such mails will always occupy top slots.

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Such bug will be exploited by Spammer in most effective manner