[Dovecot] imap internaldate

[Mark E. Mallett]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 12:47:30PM -0500, Payton Swick wrote:
> This is the beginning of the thread which seems to also note this bug. Was
> anything ever resolved here?
> 
> http://dovecot.procontrol.fi/list/dovecot/2003-July/001906.html
> 
> Quoting Payton <payton at repligen.com>:
> 
> >I think I found a bug in dovecot which I'm not sure where to fix. (I may
> >even have found a reference to it in an archived list message from Jul
> >2003.) Here is the situation:
> >
> >dovecot (dovecot-0.99.10.4) running with an imap server on an mbox
> >system is queried by a local client program, like Mail.app, and is
> >told the "Received" date of the message (presumably sent through
> >INTERNALDATE), however, that date is being passed on in GMT (-0000)
> >instead of the server or client's local time zone (EST -0500, in this
> >case). Maybe it's assumed that the local client will convert this time to
> >the local zone, but no clients I know actually do that.



FWIW it's working now for me (your link leads to some of my comments
earlier).  I don't think it's a bug as much as a deficiency in the
"From " line format used in the mbox storage.  I first ran into it
long before dovecot, when we put qmail on some systems.  The
pseudo-standard "From " format doesn't include a timezone field --
historically it was written using localtime.  qmail (and maybe some
others) use UTC -- but still without adding any indication of what the
timezone is.  Bringing in qmail resulted in a lot of mboxes with mixed
types: some "From " lines using localtime and some using UTC.  I made
a change to our local delivery agent(s) so that they would add a
timezone indication, first using a "UTC" timezone and then later
changed to using "+0000".  

I suspect you didn't make those changes, so you are likely to have
"From " lines without any indication of what timezone they are
assuming.  So dovecot may be making one assumption that doesn't match
what your local delivery agent is doing.  You can always go into 
the code and try to force it, I suppose.

As for me:  at some point Timo made a change to dovecot to recognize
the extended date format in the "From " line.  However there was
still a minor issue, see:

    http://dovecot.procontrol.fi/list/dovecot/2003-November/002583.html

(given the Timo's statements about redoing the mbox code, this is
probably moot)

mm