How to Backdate an Email

Emails are necessary for communication nowadays. They allow us to exchange important information and messages with our friends, family, and colleagues. If you frequently send emails for work, you might find it helpful to schedule them in advance to streamline your workflow.

But what if you forget to send an important email before the deadline? Is there a way to send an email with a previous date? Luckily, there are a few methods you can use to backdate an email, such as adjusting your computer’s date and time, using Inspect Element, or creating an SMTP server.

In this post, I’ll discuss a few ways you can send an email with a previous date.

1. Adjust Your Computer’s Date & Time

One simple way to send an email with a previous date is to change your computer’s clock to the desired date and time before sending the email. Some older email clients, like Outlook Express, will accept this altered date and send it to the email server with the local date and time.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. If you’re using a Windows computer, right-click on the clock on your desktop.
2. Select the “Adjust date/time” option.
3. Change the date to your desired one, then click “Okay”.
4. Compose and send your email.

If you’re using a Mac, you can try a similar approach with one of the many mail clients available for macOS.

Why This Method May Not Work

While this method may be effective in some cases, it’s important to note that the email’s metadata will still display the correct date. Therefore, there are a few reasons why this method may not work:

1. Depending on how you have your email set up, your email provider might change the time and date.
2. The computers that send your email to its destination will ignore the timestamp from the computer and use the server time instead.
3. The metadata from your email server will show when it received your email, not when you actually wrote and sent it.
4. The email server that receives your email will still show the correct time it was received before sending it to the recipient.

For example, if we look at the image of an email’s metadata above, we can see that the real-time and date are shown four different times:

1. Delivery date: Thu, 08 Sep 2016 17:31:45 +0100.
2. Received: from mail by mail147.extendcp.com with spam virus-scanned (Exim 4.80.1) for EMAIL ADDRESS; Thu, 08 Sep 2016 17:31:45 +0100.
3. Server (version=TLS1_0, cipher=TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA_P384) id 15.1.609.9; Thu, 8 Sep 2016 16:31:40 +0000.
4. Received: from DB5PR03MB1415.eurprd03.prod.outlook.com 15.01.0587.013; Thu, 8 Sep 2016 16:31:40 +0000.

To see the metadata for any email in Gmail, just click the three dots in the top right corner of the email. Then, click Show original. This will display the correct date and time for each stop the email makes on its way to the recipient, as shown in the screenshot below.

Curious about how all this stuff works behind the scenes? Take a look at our tutorial on how TCP/IP works.

2. Setting up an SMTP server

So, the email server automatically adds the correct date and time to your email. But what if you could set up and control your own email server?

Emails work using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and SMTP servers, which are actually not that hard to set up and use.

If you have an older version of Windows, especially a server operating system like Windows Server 2000, you might already have an SMTP server on your PC. All you need to do is enable it and configure it to send your emails.

However, Windows 10 no longer includes an SMTP server. Luckily, there are plenty of free SMTP server programs that you can download. It may seem like a lot of work just to make an email date appear different, but if it’s absolutely necessary, this might be your only option.

Keep in mind that you need to own a domain in order to follow this procedure!

3. Using hMailServer

hMailServer is one of the most popular free email servers. Here’s a quick guide on how to install and configure it.

1. Get the latest version of hMailServer and download it.
2. Run the installer. You can simply accept the default settings.
3. In the hMailServer interface, click on “localhost,” click “Connect,” and enter the password.
4. Go to the “Domains” tab.
5. Select “Add Domain.”
6. Enter your domain name and click “Save.”
7. Click on the domain name in the domain list, and then go to the “Accounts” subfolder.
8. Select “Add” and enter the account information for the email account you want to create on your domain.

In order to set up the actual mail transfers, you’ll need to get information from your ISP, with whom you registered the domain.

4. Modifying Webmail with Inspect Element

If you’re using Gmail or another webmail client, you can use Google Chrome’s “Inspect Element” feature to temporarily change the HTML code that displays an email on your screen. You can then take a screenshot of the modified email to show that it has a specific date.

Just remember that this essentially involves forgery, so be aware of the legal consequences when engaging in this behavior.

1. Open the email you want to modify in your Gmail account.
2. Right-click on the displayed date and select “Inspect” from the menu.
3. Double-click on the time text under the “grid cell” in the Element Inspector and change it to the desired date and time. The text in the email itself will change when you press “Return” in the Inspector.
4. Quickly take a screenshot. The element will only display for a few seconds before Chrome reverts it back to the original text defined in the HTML source.
5. Crop your screenshot to only show the email with the modified date.

It won’t fool the FBI, but it might be convincing enough for your professor.

Final Thoughts

If you ever need to backdate an email for any reason, these are a few tricks you can try. However, keep in mind that while they might fool some people who don’t dig deeper, these methods are far from foolproof and likely won’t work against more tech-savvy individuals.

Do you have any other tips or methods for sending backdated emails? Feel free to share them in the comments below!

If you found this post helpful, consider checking out our guide on how to forward email to your phone as a text message next.

FAQs

1. How do I send an email from a previous date?

A. While there isn’t a guaranteed method to send a backdated email, you can try a few methods:
1. Change the date and time on your computer.
2. Set up an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server.
3. Modify elements of the email using the inspect feature.

2. Can I backdate an email?

A. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to send an email with a previous date. You can try the methods mentioned in this post, but they are far from foolproof. While they might fool individuals who don’t investigate further, they likely won’t work against more tech-savvy people.