[Dovecot] changing INTERNALDATE or similar

[Karl Rudnick]

On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 08:52 -0700, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> Why does it matter where the timestamp lives? No matter how it was  
> stored, you would have had the exact same problem because your client  
> told Dovecot to use the current timestamp when saving the messages.
> 
> And why would keeping the INTERNALDATE in mtime be bad? It only  
> changes if you write to the file. And existing mails must not be  
> modified or you'll get other problems as well.
> 
Actually, it wasn't the client (Outlook) that told Dovecot. I rarely
save to my IMAP server from Outlook - only Thunderbird and Evolution. I
think it was a result of my original migration from mbox (uw-imap) to
Maildir (uw-imap). I did this by having both IMAP servers (uw and
dovecot) accounts alive simultaneously in evolution and let evolution
copy from the uw-account to the dovecot-imap account. It could be
evolution's fault, but I thought it was doing an IMAP4 copy, in which
case the INTERNALDATE should have been preserved according to the spec,
but maybe evolution was just doing its own thing. So, before the
migration, there was not even the concept of a timestamp on the uw-imap
store for each mail.

Unfortunately, dates can change unexpectedly - not just when you modify
the file, as I move data around between machines as they become obsolete
and the wrong settings in the move can obliterate those mtimes - we
humans do make mistakes. Nevertheless, I am happy with my current
situation and at least understand what's going on. 

THANKS, all, for your explanations and suggestions