[Dovecot] Sorting messages by date

[Willem Riede]

On 11/17/2005 10:12:07 PM, Stephen Allen wrote:
> I've recovered a load of messages from a different mail server without it's  
> index file (it was corrupted).  I now have thousands of messages which  
> display in Outlook Express (yes, you may puke at this), all as today's date.  
> However when I read them in Pine, the date of each message is displayed  
> correctly, but they're in no particular order whatsoever.

You didn't (or weren't able to) restore the original file date/time stamps?

> There are several questions here, some of which aren't suitable for this  
> list, but for completeness...
> 
> 1.
> Does Dovecot store what it thinks is the date the message arrived, in it's  
> index file?

No, because you can delete the index and it gets re-created.

> 2.
> Can I fake Dovecot into thinking the messages arrived on a different date by  
> including something in the message headers, or changing the date/time stamp  
> of each file (but I don't know how to do this)?

The file time stamp is important. You could extract the original send time  
stamp from the "Date:" header and use the "touch" command to change the file  
time stamp to that value...

Success, Willem Riede.