[Dovecot] INTERNALDATE call, timezone randomly changes

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2008-11-26 at 12:25 +0000, Guy wrote:
> I've run into an odd little problem. We use SquirrelMail as the basis
> for our webmail. Recently I've had a user complaining that the
> "Received" time on mail in the Sent folder has changed between logins.
> The change is always been by +1 hours or -5 hours. While checking, our
> developer had a time changed by +2 hours. On refresh it changed back.
> He poked through the code and it looks like SquirrelMail gets the
> received date via an IMAP command:
> A003 FETCH 1:10 (INTERNALDATE FLAGS BODY.PEEK[HEADER.FIELDS (To
> Content-Type Subject Date)])

Could you enable e.g. rawlog and show me logs of two different
INTERNALDATE replies for the same message?
http://wiki.dovecot.org/Debugging/Rawlog

> I'm running dovecot 1.1.6, and I'm wondering how that function gets
> the date and time? If I can isolate the source of the timezone I can
> try and correct it. The server time shown by "date" is correct and
> /etc/localtime is /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London (which is correct
> - I've also se the timezone in /etc/conf.d/clock is set to
> "Europe/London" now), so I'm wondering where else the information
> could be coming from?

dovecot -n output could be helpful. Anyway assuming you're using maildir
the INTERNALDATE is looked up from the file's mtime and then that time
is converted to the server's local timezone.

The only things I can think of that could cause timezone to change
unexpectedly is chrooting or setting TZ environment (before running
dovecot or "tz" field returned from userdb).
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