[Dovecot] Datehandling bug?

[Bill Cole]

At 1:40 AM +0100 9/12/07, Ed W wrote:
>Hi, I am testing dovecot 1.0.3 alongside my existing courier 
>installation and a number of my emails are heading to the top of the 
>inbox even though they are rather old.  Closer inspection shows that 
>my mailclient (Thunderbird on Win32) is showing me some screwey 
>dates for a number of messages.
>

It would be very wrong for any IMAP or POP server to do anything more 
than just pass along the Date header of a message as-is to a client.


>One example is an email which says:
>
>Date: 2007-08-21 11:42:43
>
>
>But in TB I see the date shown as only:
>
>03:27
>
>ie just a time and no date
>
>OK, the date above is clearly not an RFC date, but any idea why this 
>is showing up only under Dovecot?  Is it a dovecot date handling 
>issue?

Are you able to look at the same message store via Courier? If so, 
what does TBird show on that message when seen through Courier? I 
expect it will be the same. You should also look at the message on 
disk to see what it looks like if you want absolute confirmation that 
the Date header is what it is without reference to which IMAP server 
you use. Dovecot or Courier don't parse message headers for clients. 
As you say, that Date header is improperly formatted. Whatever 
generated that message is broken, and it is not really a bug for mail 
clients (i.e. TBird) to choke on parsing it, although presenting 
ANYTHING as a Date when the Date header can easily be detected as 
improper is arguably a bug.



-- 
Bill Cole                                  
bill at scconsult.com