On Jul 18, 2008, at 6:33 PM, Karl Rudnick wrote:
How could any implementation of this protocol possibly use a file
system time stamp to represent that important piece of meta-data, no matter where the file lives? It seems totally reasonable that
this is what Outlook uses for the Received date (and I rarely defend
Microsoft).This seems like a real design flaw in the dovecot implementation. I
am fairly new to dovecot (and like many aspects of it over uw-imap), but having to really be careful with my mail store's mtimes borders on the
absurd. I realize it is "implementation defined", but the intent of the
definition surely does not refer to file system time stamps. Any chance this can be reconsidered? Is this an actual dovecot issue or a more general
Maildir issue?
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.