Windows Live Mail has received date set well into the future e.g. 01/01/24055 00:00

Hi Dan,

The Windows Live Mail doesn't have a time settings. It basically uses the system time zone to adjust the timestamps on mail messages to local time. If the time is wrong on messages as you read them, right-click on the clock in the system tray, select Adjust date/time and click Change time zone. Make sure the clock is  still showing the correct time after doing so.

Update use with the results.

Regards.

This is a problem I've not come across before. I can only make a few comments:

The WLM receive date

You will see two dates in the Windows Live Mail interface: Date and Sent. Sent is the one in the Date: header line, applied by the mail submission server. Date is, I think, the one on the latest (highest) Received: header line. The date when the message is actually received by Windows Live Mail might be much later than these, but it will be recorded as the Date Created of the .eml file it is saved as. The Date Modified of this file will change each time something happens to it. Here are the dates for a message in my inbox when viewed in the Windows 10 File Explorer:

(I had to go back a long way to find a message with an appreciable difference between Date sent and Date received)

So, the date seen in two-line view (View tab > Message list), or in the Date column in one-line view, is the first in the message headers. The syntax of a Received header is clearly laid down in RFC821; it consists at least of a from-host, a by-host, a semi-colon and a date-time group. Any optional information should be given before the semi-colon. This means that the number* at the end of the highest Received line in your example headers is non-standard.  

It looks like Yahoo is misbehaving and as if Windows Live Mail is trying (and failing) to interpret that number as a date in accepted RFC2822 format.

Can you establish that it's only messages with something like ;1488805367.191 at the end of the highest Received header that demonstrate this weird behaviour?

* 1488805367.191 is the UNIX timestamp representing Monday 6 March 2017 13:02:47 +0000. It's actually the number of seconds since 1 January 1970. See here: Date format converter

Thanks, good spot and interesting.

Yes, the anomalous 'received' dated emails do have this semi colon/number suffix whereas all others do not. So far it has only come from two Yahoo accounts (but not all) and a BT account. I wonder where it is getting the UNIX timestamp suffix from e.g. at the originating Yahoo/BT server or our host server?

Dan

Thanks again. Interesting. The last receiving account is our web hosts (and our dedicated server) however it is not consistent -sometimes I see the Unix timestamp and ensuing bad date in WLM but then others from the same Yahoo account on the same day to the same host account are fine. I'll check with the host although I doubt they'll be too interested!