[Dovecot] Thunderbird 1.5 and messages with no Date: header

John Peacock jpeacock at rowman.com
Fri May 19 16:58:15 EEST 2006


grant beattie wrote:
> these clients use BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (Date)] as the date for
> messages. when a message has no Date: header, they display the
> date as 01/01/1970 10:00:00 because Dovecot returns empty string.

IMNSHO, the appropriate fix is to refuse these messages in the initial 
SMTP transaction.  RFC-2822, section 3.6 clearly states:

>    The only required header fields are the origination date field and
>    the originator address field(s).  All other header fields are
>    syntactically optional.  More information is contained in the table
>    following this definition.
> 

Any message without a DATE: and FROM: header is malformed and should be 
refused.  When I turned this on, the only legitimate messages that were 
bounced were from a stupid print-to-email feature on our HP 
printer/copiers.  I routed those through an MTA that added a DATE: 
header and all was fine.

YMMV

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD  20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748


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