[Dovecot] Datehandling bug?
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.
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?
Cheers
Ed W
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
On closer inspection it appears not to be server related, but Thunderbird related (as you might expect).
Two machines, one having only used Dovecot, and the other only having used Courier *do* indeed show different inbox ordering.
BUT, if I reset the folder and redownload the courier folder then the ordering changes again (and shows this date inconsistency). So it seems that Thunderbird does different things with the same data depending on when/how it was received. Quite possibly it's simply putting in a todays date (when missing) depending on when the headers are first downloaded...?
Sorry for the noise - however, hopefully someone else might see this in the archives if facing a similar question
Ed W
On 2007-09-12 10:00, Ed W wrote:
So it seems that Thunderbird does different things with the same data depending on when/how it was received. Quite possibly it's simply putting in a todays date (when missing) depending on when the headers are first downloaded...?
AFAIK that's how it is. Timestamp first seen is used when no usable date is found in the headers. Though for some time now the received header should be used to get timestamp from when there's no usable Date: line. At least that's how it works for POP, not 100% sure for IMAP.
Juergen
---AV & Spam Filtering by M+Guardian - Risk Free Email (TM)---
participants (3)
-
Bill Cole
-
Ed W
-
Jürgen Herz