I successfully executed the script which "fixed" my mail store. I also see now why there isn't a buttoned down solution out there. The basic steps are simple as outlined below, but when dealing with ~35,000 emails going back before 1993, there were just about a dozen that didn't adhere to the "Date:" screening and subsequent capture for use by "touch --date". Adding these exceptions to my script completely automated the INTERNALDATE resetting, but I would not publish this publicly on the internet. Nevertheless, I would share it with anyone who requests through this mail group given the caveat that it is only guaranteed to work for MY personal data store. Thanks - Karl

-----Original Message----- From: Rudnick, Karl Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 9:06 AM To: dovecot@dovecot.org Cc: Timo Sirainen Subject: RE: [Dovecot] changing INTERNALDATE or similar

Terrific - I'll just write a script to:

1. create a list of all Maildir folders ending in "/cur"
2. remove dovecot.index* in each folder
3. For each mail file in each Mailder /cur folder: a. grep/sed "Date:" to grab first date/time stamp in email b. pipe the output of a. into "touch --date" for that file

On my windows side, all the imap info is saved in one pst file in "C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook*imap*.pst" and if I blow it away it gets correctly rebuilt - I just tested it and the blown away index files get rebuilt so that Outlook then has the correct Received date displayed. Pretty easy to do, but surprised a script wasn't openly available - or at least my googling skills weren't good enough. Since I have ~35,000 emails in about 450 folders, this needs to be scripted. I'll make it available when I get it smoothed out.

Thanks again for the clarification.

• Karl

-----Original Message----- From: Timo Sirainen [mailto:tss@iki.fi] Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 4:58 AM To: Rudnick, Karl; Dovecot Mailing List Subject: Re: [Dovecot] changing INTERNALDATE or similar

On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 16:56 -0700, Karl Rudnick wrote:

I have a question which others must have encountered. I switched from uw-imap to dovecot-imap a few months ago and moved my fairly large mail archive (~15 yrs) by simply mounting both accounts in a mail app and simply copying my folders over. This worked well, and all my mail is in order when I view it in evolution or thunderbird on any number of machines. However, since our company uses MS Exchange Server, when I add my dovecot imap account to outlook, everything is great except the received dates - it looks like the date I made the transition, but in all instances it's not simply the time stamp in the Maildir folder. I googled around on this and have gathered that this date is coming somewhere from within the dovecot index file.

INTERNALDATE comes from the maildir files' mtimes. So you can use whatever utility/script you want to modify the mtime (I don't have any suggestions). Then delete dovecot.index.cache file to make sure the old value wasn't cached. You might also have to recreate the account in your clients to make sure they haven't cached the old values.