iPhone Owners Receive Ghost Emails From January 1, 1970

Millions of Apple iPhone and iPads users got ghost emails dated January 1, 1970 in their inbox. However the point to be noted here is that ‘emails’ only came into being in the early 1990’s and there was not even internet in 1970. Well it is not a bug or malware which is trying to get hold of the devices by sending malicious emails to the users. Rather it is a glitch in the Apple’s iOS which is causing users to seem empty email dated January 1, 1970.

These emails are empty in nature without having any subject or sender name even opening these emails doesn’t show anything. It is has been established that the cause of these emails affecting millions of iOS users is simply a glitch in the operating system. Most of the Apple users are shown their discomfort by tweeting about receiving mails on the social media platform.

Reason behind iOS showing 1970’s dated emails

The 1970 dated emails were only received by the iPhone or iPad users when they use their device to check mails in a different timezone. In the computer language the January 1, 1970 is represented as 0 in UNIX time. This is the reason why users tend to get 1970 dated emails when they are using mails in a different time zone.

Furthermore the way computer treats time is very much different and a lot of process work towards right presentation of time on the device. Every second after the midnight of January 1, 1970 happens to be a completely different point in the UNIX time system. Therefore iPhone and iPad devices rendering the default time as zero when email is accessed in different time zone but it gets interpreted as January 1, 1970 on the device. The Apple iOS devices makes use of the UNIX time and this is resulting widespread glitch of showing ghost emails from 1970’s.

Just a month ago Apple iPhone and iPad users got a rude shock when they were simply fooled into setting their devices date to 1970 and later it resulted in rendering the devices unusable. Therefore getting similar kind of email dated into same year simply brought a warning signal for the users even though it was caused by a glitch in the operating system itself. A number of users has found a way to resolve the issue of having email dated January 1, 1970 by performing a hard reset of the device. Users can hard reset their iPhone device by holding down the lock and home button simultaneously.

The world’s first electronic message was sent in 1971 

As stated earlier there is no point one can get an email in 1970 as there was no email in that age. It should be understood that the very first electronic message transmission between two computers happened only in 1971.

Then 1990’s Microsoft came up with an email client called Internet Mail and other software like Lotus Notes followed by the emergence of web-based services. These all ushered the ear of mainstream usage of email over the years.