Yahoo! Mail “0000-00-00 and 9999-99-99” bug

You may have noticed emails from Yahoo accounts recently that include the string “between 0000-00-00 and 9999-99-99” at the bottom of the email. Apparently it gets added to outbound email only on new emails that were composed.

It’s a bug in Yahoo which crept in on April 15 during an upgrade. It’s an issue related to accessing the MySQL database and a date / time comparison. There is no way for Yahoo! Mail users to fix the problem, but it also doesn’t appear to cause any harm beyond thoroughly confusing everyone.

Yahoo is aware of the problem. Their current statement on it is:

“Please be assured that we are aware of this issue and have escalated this to our Engineering Department for further investigation. We hope to have it resolved as soon as possible”.

3 thoughts on “Yahoo! Mail “0000-00-00 and 9999-99-99” bug

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  2. Hello Jami, the ANSI standard for dates is YYYY-MM-DD, that’s where this format comes from. This format is also used by MySQL, the database used by Yahoo! Mail, therefore any valid date is “between 0000-00-00 and 9999-99-99”, it’s just that this message should never have been displayed. It was a program error.

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