We recently encountered this with a new VOIP voicemail system. However,
using Thunderbird at least, the time the message file was written is
used (probably using "INTERNALDATE").
This might only apply if you're using Maildir's, but it shows that the
behavior you're seeing might be specific to Mutt.
Rich
Kyle Wheeler wrote:
Hello,
Occasionally, I get mail that's missing a Date header. The usual
suspects are iTunes weekly mailings and NYTimes email-to-a-friend
articles. I use qmail, which doesn't "fix" these malformed emails by
adding a Date header (like Sendmail does), so when they get to my
mailbox, they're just as badly formed as they were when they were sent,
which is to say, they have no Date header. Unfortunately, this means
that SORT (DATE) puts them at the beginning of the list---and in a
mailbox with lots of old mail, that's usually the wrong spot.
Now, my email clients will do some basic guesswork about when the
message was sent, usually by falling back on the timestamp of the
first-added Received header. So, they will display a date. But they have
to then sort all messages themselves in order to get a valid sorting.
Would it be possible to get Dovecot to fall back to Received header
parsing whenever a message is missing a Date header? The idea is that
SORT (DATE) would then become useful even in the face of commonly
malformed email. How hard would this be to hack into the current Dovecot
source? Does this maybe exist already (e.g. as SORT (X-DATE)?
~Kyle
