Virgin Media Community

[bw41101]

Greetings all;

Have recently been bombarded (more than usual) by bitcoin and other scammers and it seems that they are employing an new tactic in circumventing the VM webmail filter - bogus dates. By this I mean that the date format they are using is: 01/01/70 at 01:00 hours.

In addition, this date format means that when the mail is picked up by the PC's mail client (in my case Thunderbird) it is plonked at the bottom of the inbox instead of at the top. The result of this is that users may not notice the arrival of the scum mail and consequentially (when finally discovered) the list built up can be excessively large.

The trouble is that the date option within the VM's e mail filter is so inflexible that it is impossible to manually enter the above date - when one tries to input the above, the filter always reverts to: 1/1/1970 which (obviously) is not recognised - absolutely useless!!

Can anyone provide a solution, as it seems that the VM webmail filter needs to be updated to allow plain text to be entered instead of the current inflexible system - unless (of course) I've missed something?

I look forward to all constructive answers.

Cheers

Chris (bw 41101).

[用心棒]

I would expect a ill-defined date to be converted before a comparison operation; seeing a rule's ill-defined date condition also converted is not unexpected.

Does your rule fail to match an email's date of of 01/01/1970?

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[bw41101]

Thanks for the response.

I'm unable to enter the date/time (as shown below) within the filter rule, as the year is 70 - 49 years from now. In addition the filter rule doesn't seem accept 01/01/ for day/month (after it is typed) as it comes out as 1/1/.

If the date option (within Add condition menu), the had the facility of entering the date in plain text instead of the auto calendar then it would be a simpler and more effective way of filtering this scum mail. In any respect, for this particular filter the presentation would need to be exact for the filter to work effectively.

[Graham_A]

As a matter of interest what date is your computer's internal clock currently showing?

01/01/70 is the usual default date shown when the internal bios battery has failed and the computer doesn't know the current date.

[bw41101]

The BIOS is showing today's date - Sat 23rd January 2021.

My motherboard is a (twin processor) server board and any BIOS issues are flagged up immediately, I.e. it wouldn't allow the system to boot. Deja-vu, I've had the issue of a flat BIOS battery before - LOL!

[Graham_A]

Ok, it was worth asking the question just in case.

Interesting that I think of 01/01/70 as being 51 years ago rather than 49 years ahead!

Is that the Millennium bug 😄

[用心棒]

Can you view the email's source text and confirm it states 2070 and not 1970; it is likely you will see the latter?

Webmail stores the date and time value set in a filter rule as an offset in milliseconds from an epoch (a fixed point in time) of 1 January 1970 00:00, for example 1 January 1970 01:00 would be stored as 3600000 and 1 January 2070 01:00 as 3155763600000. If you really want to set the year to 2070 in a filter rule then type 2070  as the year and not 70. When the received date of an email is converted to epoch time if it equals 3155763600000 then the rule's action will be executed.

[bw41101]

Interesting indeed. When looking at the source of one of my emails, I found this:

MIME-Version: 1.0
X-CNFS-Analysis: 01044410_02044402_0303444303

When checking the numerical sequences (reading left to right above), using epoch time converter, I discovered the following:

GMT: Tuesday, 13 January 1970 02:06:50
Your time zone: Tuesday, 13 January 1970 03:06:50
Relative: 51 years ago

GMT: Saturday, 24 January 1970 15:53:22
Your time zone: Saturday, 24 January 1970 16:53:22
Relative: 51 years ago

GMT: Tuesday, 14 August 1979 02:05:03
Your time zone: Tuesday, 14 August 1979 03:05:03
Relative: 41 years ago

Okay the date is not exact as per my previous e mails but the representative year (1970 for 01044410_02044402) looks to be, unless I've missed something else within the source page - nevertheless this is the only place (within the source page) where these timestamps appear.

I'll give your advice a try and see what happens.

For interest, you may find it interesting to have a look at the following site - Dates in Hiding, Uncovering Timestamps in Forensic Email Examination - link:

https://www.metaspike.com/timestamps-forensic-email-examination/

Cheers Chris - bw41101