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

[mouss]

Charles Marcus wrote:
> Hey mouss,

<OT>
> 
> Still waiting on your comments on the new vacation.pl for postfixadmin -
> had a chance to take a look yet?
> 

not yet. sorry.
</OT>

> On 8/20/2008, mouss (mouss at netoyen.net) wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> If you sort them by 'Order Received'. If you sort them by the standard
> 'Date' column (I'm talking TBird-speak here), then they are sorted by
> the Date/time that the Senders CLIENT thought it was when they sent
> their message. I am on more than a few lists where people have their
> clocks screwed up - most often its a DST issue, but sometimes its a
> time-zone issue - and more rare, their clock is off by weeks or more -
> and these messages get sorted OUT of order.
> 

same problem with spam sent with ratware. I rarely use "sort by date". 
on list folders, I generally use a threading view.

Anyway, I don't find this to be a critical problem, so I don't really care.

> When I enable the 'Order Received' column, that will fix those issues,
> but then - as you pointed out - messages that have been moved from one
> folder to another are now out of order.
> 

yes. I didn't check other MUAs.

> Again... this is why I mentioned using the actual date/time that MY
> MAILSERVER received the message (of course this requires that its clock
> be correct, but it always is, so not an issue for me).
> 
>> 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).
> 
> For the reasons I outlined above, I disagree...
> 
> I think having an MUA with the ability to parse the actual Received
> date/time would be very handy...
> 

you are saying so because you use postfix which Received headers are 
easy to parse. Now take a look at the spamassassin code that parses 
received headers and you'll see what nightmare it is. not something a 
developper would "expose" to users (we're talking about TB, which is 
intended for the "general public").


> [snip]
> 
> It sounds like this INTERNALDATE changes... I'd like something that is
> from the message headers - ie, that doesn't change - so that sorting
> will *always* be what I want/expect, even if I move messages from one
> IMAP server to another...
> 

If I'm not wrong, TB (and maybe other MUAs) implements "move" by 
creating a new  copy (so a new and unrelated file is created) and then 
deleting the old one. This explains why one sometimes gets out of quota 
(or disk space) when trying to "delete" mail ("move" to Trash). anyway, 
this causes a new filename, which breaks the order (even if you do ls in 
your cur/ subdir).