Hello all,

My name is Djule Djukic and I am working for Hipotekarna Banka from Montenegro.
We are using IMAP email server Dovecot version 2.1.17. As a email clients on our corporate workstations we are using Thunderbird or WebMail and everything is working fine.

We decided to introduce MDM solution in our environment and we installed VMWare WorkspaceOne (former Airwatch) which use Boxer as a mail client in App per VPN scenario.
When we syncronise email with  Boxer  we have found that the time and date displayed for some messages  have been changed to the time at which the file was synchronized.

This is not hapening with all messages. It is happening only with messages in subfolders, never with Inbox.
It seems when messages is moved by some rule from WebMail or Thunderbird from Inbox to some subfolder, Boxer is not able to read dates correctly,

By seraching on Internet we found couple of explanation what might be possibel cause of this behaviour.
https://imapsync.lamiral.info/FAQ.d/FAQ.Dates.txt
https://serverfault.com/questions/588618/maintain-email-timestamp-when-transferring-between-email-servers-using-an-email
https://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2008-July/032165.html

Problem with some email clients is that they not look always for "Date:" from email message header. The "Date:" header is usually the date the message was written or sent the first time, at the writer side.
This "Date:" header line is never changed by any transfer or copy.
If an email client uses the "Date:" header for displaying the date of a message then no problem in synchronization with wrong date should arise. Obviously this is not a case with a Boxer email application.
We tried GMail and everything is working fine.

We are wondering if someone can explain what APPEND command could have done in our case? Is it relevant at all for our case? Is it used somehow by thunderbird or webmail clients?
Also we would like to hear from someone if there are some improvemnents in further release of dovecot or some configuration that we can implement in order to fix this?

Thank you in advanced for your suggestions and contribution,


Đule Đukić

Specijalista za informacionu bezbjednost / ISO