On Dec 31, 2020, I received reminders for a bunch of birthdays for the following day. Again on 1/1/2021, today, I received those reminders. I checked my calendar, and there were 22 of my contacts (including my card) that suddenly showed up with a birthday on 1/1 - but the kicker is the year is 1601!
I have been checking other forums, and have seen that this has been a problem in years past, as well, and those forums are now closed, so I want to open this again.
I am on Mac OS Catalina, using Outlook 365 client (desktop app).
I assume those birthday and anniversary dates used to be blank, and is why they got randomly filled; however, I have over 1800 contacts, and many more are still blank. If I try to blank the date out, I cannot from Outlook 365 for Mac because you MUST have a date using the dropdown calendar - no choice to leave blank. Someone suggested to put the view into card view and then you can edit the date out - but, again, my Mac Outlook 365 does not have the card view option.
I can understand some of this is coming from the Georgian calendar with some old COBOL programming, but most of these contacts are very recent - at least recent enough that they were not imported with some old program language. It could even be a leap day
bug, since 2020 was a leap year, and they showed up the following January. (This is just a lot of guessing from the forums I've found on this 1/1/1601 date.)
It seems that they may be coming from my Google account - some have tags I added (or categories) that tell me that they were imported from a previous Outllook account I had; however others are not. On another forum, they were using Outlook desktop versions, but their issues were with their yahoo account contacts, so the common factor seems to be Outlook.
I seem to be able to completely erase the birthday date in Google's web version, but there is no anniversary date to change from Google. This again tells me it is coming from Outlook. When I sync the account from Outlook, it appears to remove the birthday date from Outlook, but the anniversay date still remains, obviously. Fortunately, it does not sync the other direction, haha!
I am in the process of reporting it to Microsoft, but not sure if I have the right venue (going through Outlook's Contact Support from the Help menu). If anyone knows of a better way to report it, and/or how to remove the anniversary dates, please advise.
