I don't know for sure if this will work, as I haven't done it, but i've seen emails with the wrong date/time, and this is the way i'd think it happened technically, so this has a chance. If you set up your own smtp server with whatever date/time, that might do it, and cause the email program or web interface to use/see that date/time.
Email headers would give the prank away but it could work.
I have seen email with the wrong date/time, that includes wrong year.
There are other servers in the route, you can't set up the To person's POP server, and headers will give the prank away, if they check the headers.
But as i've seen emails with the wrong year, and it has been from either a spammer(with the wrong year) or emails with the wrong time, from an individual I know, and it hasn't been all emails, so I know it must've been something at their end, i.e. seems like it must be their SMTP server.
Good luck with that. Time stampety-stamp-stamp on every handoff along the way. Truth Fabrication in email... interesting concept but full of fail in implementation. – Fiasco Labs – 2013-09-27T06:17:35.813
I have had spam emails with false dates once.. and once I had an email with a wrong date/time. With the spam emails with false dates, I don't recall the year but I think it may have been a very early year, so as to get to be my allegedly oldest emails(thus having some strange prominence). And the case of an email from a friend having the wrong date/time it must've been set wrong on the server the email went through. (I don't recall for sure but there may have been a few times there and only the one was funny - which makes sense). But the email client used the funny one. – barlop – 2013-09-27T06:26:42.357
@FiascoLabs so following on from ^^ comment.. sure if they check the headers they'd see. but in those instances, but for just the email client or web interface to pick up the wrong date/time is not impossible. OK for a prank on somebody that doesn't know to check headers. Not ok for a crime! I don't know whether it takes the time from the SMTP server or the POP server receiving.. If the former then you could, would be a funny project. note- I don't recall if the spam one I got was a future one that stuck as new, or a past one that stuck as the first email. or if i got both. – barlop – 2013-09-27T06:31:19.730
Use a virtual machine maybe? Then you could have any date time... As for stamping, each server has it's own rules... – Dave – 2013-09-27T07:09:37.400
1Barlop said "But the email client used the funny one." I've seen Thunderbird do just that -- display the date/time from the sender's system -- but Gmail on the web, as well as many other sites, don't use the same header field. So you are quite right that the email client may display it with the false date. I have to admit, I experimented with this a bit last year, to see how different clients behaved. – Debra – 2013-09-28T23:51:34.477
@Debra: your results would be interesting: Which email client behaves how? As far as I can summarize, there are three dates a client could show: 1. the senders time, 2. the time it went through the email server, 3. the time it arrived in your POP/IMAP account. @Debra can you post the results of your tests here? Which email client shows which date from the email headers?
– rubo77 – 2013-09-29T07:00:17.250