At 1:40 AM +0100 9/12/07, Ed W wrote:
Hi, I am testing dovecot 1.0.3 alongside my existing courier installation and a number of my emails are heading to the top of the inbox even though they are rather old. Closer inspection shows that my mailclient (Thunderbird on Win32) is showing me some screwey dates for a number of messages.
It would be very wrong for any IMAP or POP server to do anything more than just pass along the Date header of a message as-is to a client.
One example is an email which says:
Date: 2007-08-21 11:42:43
But in TB I see the date shown as only:
03:27
ie just a time and no date
OK, the date above is clearly not an RFC date, but any idea why this is showing up only under Dovecot? Is it a dovecot date handling issue?
Are you able to look at the same message store via Courier? If so, what does TBird show on that message when seen through Courier? I expect it will be the same. You should also look at the message on disk to see what it looks like if you want absolute confirmation that the Date header is what it is without reference to which IMAP server you use. Dovecot or Courier don't parse message headers for clients. As you say, that Date header is improperly formatted. Whatever generated that message is broken, and it is not really a bug for mail clients (i.e. TBird) to choke on parsing it, although presenting ANYTHING as a Date when the Date header can easily be detected as improper is arguably a bug.
--
Bill Cole
bill@scconsult.com