[Dovecot] Sorting messages by date

[John and Catherine Allen]

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.
 > 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?
 > 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)?
 > 3.
 > Pine correctly picks out a date from the message (although it doesn't sort by this order), and Outlook Express just 
displays everything as the date which it (or Dovecot) first saw the message.  Does Outlook rely on Dovecot's 
sorting/date information or does it do it's own?

Steve,

My understanding has been that sort order is a function of (a) the information contained within the messages, in the 
headers and (b) the mail client.
I use both Outlook Express (which is a perfectly adequate IMAP client, not to be sneered at) and Thunderbird (1.5 
beta1). I've noticed that Outlook Express is rather flexible in that one can sort on "Sent" or "Received" dates. 
Thunderbird is less good on this allowing only "Date" which is the sent date, or "Order Received" which is the numerical 
order in which the messages were received, I'm not sure how this is worked out - maybe it's based on receive date, but 
no date is displayed.

It seems to me that the display order of your messages is entirely determined by the options within your mail clients,
and not influenced by Dovecot.

John

-- 
John Allen
Bofferdange, Luxembourg
allen at vo.lu
http://www.homepages.lu/allen