I had these 01/011970 messages immediately I upgraded to iOS4 yesterday. There were about 40 of them interspersed among my proper email messages. They have no sender and no content and cannot be opened or deleted. It is a Gmail account but they do not appear on the web account. Overnight - possibly at midnight - I received another 13.
Same issue here. The messages are not in the web version of Gmail, just in my iPhone Inbox. They started happening to my iPhone 3Gs after updating to iOS4, and today with my brand new iPhone 4. They go away after a awhile.
Currently I have message with "No Sender," "No Subject," and "This message has no content," and the date is 12/31/69!!!
I had a similar issue to this I think when I upgraded my 3G to version 3. I ended up playing around with Searchlight, finding the messages then deleting them from there. Worst case, you could just delete the mail profile, and then recreate it again. That would also prove whether it is a repeatable glitch or just a one off. You won't lose any information by doing this as it all on the server.
settings/Mail, Contacts, Calendars/delete your Gmail account (you won't lose anything your mail is in on the server)/Add New account/select Gmail and fill out the info. It works like it is supposed to, see:
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77702
I was getting this same problem. I use non-Gmail, non-Exchange, IMAP account. I figured it might be to do with the new 'mail grouping' feature in iOS4.0 so I turned that off and now I can see and read all my mails again. Hopefully it's patched in next update to 4.0.1!
I also have strange emails marked "no content." I have 63 of them dated 12/31/69. Either there is some time travel going on or 4.0 is glitching. I can't delete them and they don't show up on my computer, only on my iphone.
Weird ! I just started getting these blank unopenable 1970 emails today. I've had the iphone4 for a few weeks but never had this. As long as they are not malicious they are just annoying.
A new mail badge keeps showing up but there is of course no new mail.
I have called Apple Care 3X on this very same issue. It started day 1 with my iPhone 4. Here is the latest response after the initial "fix" did not work:
"I wanted to let you know that I received your voicemail. At this point it seems that all of our general troubleshooting for mail issues has been done. I have also seen a couple other reports of this issue and have submitted a report of this behavior to our engineers. I am currently awaiting a response from them regarding this issue and will get back in contact with you once I receive that response."
This was an email from a tech support specialist. We are seeing refunds for bumpers. Will we have refunds for buggy email support? Outrageous to launch a "smart phone" that can't properly handle email...including my MobileMe account!
Spoke too soon. Had one 1970 mail this afternoon and this evening had about 20 of them but rather mysteriously they showed up as 1/1/2001 for a bit before changing to 1/1/1970.