On Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 11:47 AM Yachay Wayllukuq via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > Is the timestamp of the mailing list itself the one that appears on the > archive website?
Yes for private archives, though with a UTC conversion. There's been some tension on this over Agora's history. The timestamp that most systems display is the one put on by the sender, under the Date header. But this is forgeable, see this "June 1993" message here: https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-business/1993-June/014163.html. And can have issues for other reasons (for example, if email is composed "offline" it can get a Date stamp hours before sending when it connects). However, we tried to use the "date received by the list" for a bit, on the grounds that it was an unforgeable common denominator, but this was a huge pain for officers because every time they wanted to record a time, they'd have to dig into the email headers or archives to find that, rather than using the Date that their client displayed. To deal with that issue, the CFJ precedents have sort of settled on "first credible" timestamp, which means use the Date applied by the sender, but if there's weird pauses between the Date and when it was received by the list, use the list date ("weird pauses" being the subject of CFJs for determining what's too long, as it's a rare event). For who did something "first" after a set time, we've chatted idly about setting up "ties", it's not hard for two people to manage to send something with the same Date down to the second just by hitting send at the right time. But nobody's tested that, and so far, there hasn't been a CFJ when message timing mattered and there was a tie in the Date string, so dunno what a judge would say to that. -G.
