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