[Dovecot] Time zone problems with dovecot-1.0-stable (20050705 nightly snapshot)

[Jon Roma]

Hi, all.

I've been lurking around here for a while, with growing interest in
dumping my crusty old UW-imapd setup in place of something better.

So far I like what I see of dovecot -- it's lean, fast, easy to configure,
robust, and secure -- none of which really apply to UW-imapd.

However, I'm having a problem with dates, both with 0.99.14 and now
with 1.0-stable.

First a few words about my setup.  I'm running on AIX 5.1, with SSL
enabled.  I had to tweak the dovecot-1.0-stable source tree to get rid
of the "//"-style comments, since the AIX xlc compiler doesn't like that
construct.  And, as with the 0.99.14 build, there's tons of compiler
warnings about <sys/types.h>, but the applications build and seem to
generally work fine.

I am using procmail to file INBOX mail in parallel into both my old
UW-imapd server (which uses mbx-format mailboxes) and into maildir-style
mailboxes accessible by the dovecot server.

In my mail user agent (Mulberry 3.1.6), I display and sort by date received.
The glitch is that all the mail on my dovecot server shows timestamps in
GMT, while the mail on my UW server properly shows timestamps in local
time (CST6CDT, currently five hours behind GMT).

In order to isolate user agent issues, I identified a recent message
sent to both my UW and dovecot servers with the thought of connecting
via telnet to both servers, fetching the message, and comparing the
difference.  The results below show that when I do the

	FETCH message INTERNALDATE

IMAP command, UW-imapd gives me the correctly-localized time, while
dovecot gives me GMT.

Incidentally, I've tried starting dovecot both with and without chroot
and even explicitly setting the TZ environment variable on startup,
both with no effect.

Does anyone have any ideas, or is this a known issue?  I have a lot more
voluminous log data that can be provided on request.  Thanks in advance.

First, the uw-imapd instance running on local port 143:

Script started on Wed Jul  6 16:49:13 2005
$ telnet localhost 143
Trying...
Connected to loopback.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4REV1 LOGIN-REFERRALS AUTH=LOGIN] loopback IMAP4rev1 
2002.336 at Wed, 6 Jul 2005 16:49:19 -0500 (CDT)
a001 login roma XXXXXXXX
a001 OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4REV1 IDLE NAMESPACE MAILBOX-REFERRALS BINARY SCAN 
SORT THREAD=REFERENCES THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT MULTIAPPEND] User roma 
authenticated
a002 capability
* CAPABILITY IMAP4REV1 IDLE NAMESPACE MAILBOX-REFERRALS BINARY SCAN SORT 
THREAD=REFERENCES THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT MULTIAPPEND LOGIN-REFERRALS 
AUTH=LOGIN
a002 OK CAPABILITY completed
a003 select inbox
* 3604 EXISTS
* 0 RECENT
* OK [UIDVALIDITY 979758742] UID validity status
* OK [UIDNEXT 26156] Predicted next UID
* FLAGS ($MDNSent Cyrusoft.Mulberry.01 Cyrusoft.Mulberry.05 \Answered 
\Flagged \Deleted \Draft \Seen)
* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS ($MDNSent Cyrusoft.Mulberry.01 Cyrusoft.Mulberry.05 \* 
\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Draft \Seen)] Permanent flags
a003 OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed
a004 fetch 3602 internaldate
* 3602 FETCH (INTERNALDATE " 6-Jul-2005 15:55:30 -0500")
a004 OK FETCH completed
a006 fetch 3602 envelope
* 3602 FETCH (ENVELOPE ("Wed, 6 Jul 2005 16:55:11 -0400" {46}
Re: [Dovecot] Binc IMAP "IMAPdir" style layout (("Mark E. Mallett" NIL 
"mem" "mv.mv.com")) ((NIL NIL "dovecot-bounces" "dovecot.org")) (("Mark E. 
Mallett" NIL "mem" "mv.mv.com")) (("Timo Sirainen" NIL "tss" "iki.fi")) 
((NIL NIL "dovecot" "dovecot.org")) NIL "<1120681173.2890.10.camel at hurina>" 
"<20050706205511.GA11708 at osmium.mv.net>"))
a005 OK FETCH completed

a007 logout
* BYE zippy.cso.uiuc.edu IMAP4rev1 server terminating connection
a007 OK LOGOUT completed
Connection closed.

And now the equivalent operation in dovecot:

Script started on Wed Jul  6 16:44:39 2005
$ telnet localhost 9897
Trying...
Connected to loopback.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK Dovecot ready.
a001 login roma XXXXXXXX
a001 OK Logged in.
a002 capability
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 SORT THREAD=REFERENCES MULTIAPPEND UNSELECT LITERAL+ 
IDLE CHILDREN NAMESPACE LOGIN-REFERRALS
a002 OK Capability completed.
a003 select inbox
* FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft)
* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft \*)] Flags 
permitted.
* 43 EXISTS
* 1 RECENT
* OK [UNSEEN 2] First unseen.
* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1118339114] UIDs valid
* OK [UIDNEXT 285] Predicted next UID
a003 OK [READ-WRITE] Select completed.
a004 fetch 41 internaldate
* 41 FETCH (INTERNALDATE "06-Jul-2005 20:55:30 +0000")
a004 OK Fetch completed.
a005 fetch 41 envelope
* 41 FETCH (ENVELOPE ("Wed, 6 Jul 2005 16:55:11 -0400" {46}
Re: [Dovecot] Binc IMAP "IMAPdir" style layout (("Mark E. Mallett" NIL 
"mem" "mv.mv.com")) ((NIL NIL "dovecot-bounces" "dovecot.org")) (("Mark E. 
Mallett" NIL "mem" "mv.mv.com")) (("Timo Sirainen" NIL "tss" "iki.fi")) 
((NIL NIL "dovecot" "dovecot.org")) NIL "<1120681173.2890.10.camel at hurina>" 
"<20050706205511.GA11708 at osmium.mv.net>"))
a005 OK Fetch completed.
a007 logout
* BYE Logging out
a007 OK Logout completed.
Connection closed.

-- 
Jon Roma <roma at uiuc.edu>
Senior Research Programmer
Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign