[Dovecot] SORT(DATE) and missing Date headers

[Kyle Wheeler]

On Monday, September 24 at 04:19 PM, quoth Rich at Whidbey Telecom:
> We recently encountered this with a new VOIP voicemail system.  However, 
> using Thunderbird at least, the time the message file was written is used 
> (probably using "INTERNALDATE").
>
> This might only apply if you're using Maildir's, but it shows that the 
> behavior you're seeing might be specific to Mutt.

It's not mutt, actually. The client where this became an issue is 
RoundCube webmail. Mutt falls back to INTERNALDATE, but think about 
it: it requires sorting on the client's side, because you're combining 
SORT(DATE) and SORT(ARRIVAL), which completely negates the whole point 
of server-side sorting. Even then, though, INTERNALDATE is a bad 
approximation if I want to sort by time *sent* (compare, for example, 
a message that I bounced from my work address to my home mailbox). The 
best approximation would be to use the first-added Received header 
(which could be several days different from INTERNALDATE).

Yes, I know *most* mail clients have a workaround for this problem. Is 
that really the best solution, though? To simply apply a workaround to 
all IMAP clients, rather than fix it in the IMAP server?

~Kyle
-- 
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, no matter how 
justified, is not a crime.
                                                    -- Ernest Hemingway
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