[Dovecot] Sent Date/time vs Received Date/time

[mouss]

Charles Marcus wrote:
> On 8/20/2008, Nicolas KOWALSKI (nicolas.kowalski at gmail.com) wrote:
>> The alpine documentation states about 'Arrival' sorting:
>>
>> " The Arrival sort option arranges messages in the MESSAGE INDEX in 
>> the order that they exist in the folder. This is usually the same as
>> the order in which they arrived. This option is comparable to not
>> sorting the messages at all. "
>>
>> It is the same (non-)ordering available in Mozilla mail clients, with
>> the 'Order Received' option.
> 
> Ok, this is something that I have thought about from time to time.
> 
> I know that every message has a 'received' header, which is basically
> the date/time stamp of the SENDERS CLIENT - so if their system's time is
> off, that date/time header will be off.
> 
> So, where does this 'Order Received' column in TBird get its info from?
> I'm guessing it is a TBird thing, like an internal index number?

the order of putting the message in the folder. this has nothing to do 
with dates contained in the message. if you manually move an old message 
to another folder, you'll see it last in the new folder.

> 
> In my mind, there should be two primary date/time columns:
> 
> Sent Date/Time = Date/time of the Client system when message was sent
> (this is already there as the plain 'Date' column)
> 
> and
> 
> Received Date/Time = Date/time the receiving SERVER DELIVERED it
> 

Parsing Received headers is not a science. so this would create 
unnecessary (IMHO) problems for MUA developpers. the "delivery" time is 
sufficient (if all mail goes to the same fielsystem).

> I can see the benefit for the third 'Client' side Date/time stamp, which
> is the current 'Order Received' in TBird.
> 
> I'd like to see support added for grabbing the last date/time from the
> LDA that delivers the message, but that obviously request is for the
> TBird devs (or most likely an extension request), but...
> 
> The main question is - is there a proper IMAP/RFC for providing/getting
> this date/time?
>