Update: head to the bottom of the post to see photographic evidence of one of the phantom iPhone 4 emails sent direct from 1970. Thanks Paul!
The iPhone 4 antenna controversy has been Apple’s biggest worry, this may be the weirdest iPhone bug going: some owners have been receiving undeletable emails from December 31, 1969. While we’ve got our fingers crossed that they truly are Back To The Future-style messages from the swinging ‘60s, others have offered up a more sensible explanation…
The time travelling iPhone 4 emails only appear in MobileMe and Gmail accounts. They come without a sender, a subject or a message to decode. Most are dated 31 December 1969 but some users have also received impossible communications from 1970.
Over in the Apple support forums, confused iPhone 4 owners and users running iOS 4 on their older iPhones and iPod touchs have racked up 6 pages of posts on the problem. Though the mysterious emails at first seem impossible to get shot of, some fixes have been offered from simply flipping between your Inbox and Sent folder to a baffling 34-step removal process.
Apple hasn’t jumped into explain how messages from a time before email are making their way into iPhone 4 inboxes yet but it seems it could all be down to the Apple OS’s debt to Unix. The start of Unix Epoch, the point from which most computers start counting time, is midnight, January 1, 1970 but with a bit of time zone adjustment that becomes New Year’s eve 1969.
Others have suggested that the mystery iPhone 4 emails are actually the result of Apple testing a mysterious mass mailing programme but we’d plump for the Unix explanation. Either that or it’s Doc Brown using the iPhone as a modern alternative to the Delorean.
Have you been on the receiving end of the iPhone 4 time travelling email bug or spotted any other interesting quirks?
