Re: [Dovecot] changing INTERNALDATE or similar

[Timo Sirainen]

On Jul 18, 2008, at 7:20 PM, Karl Rudnick wrote:

On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 08:52 -0700, Timo Sirainen wrote:

Why does it matter where the timestamp lives? No matter how it was
stored, you would have had the exact same problem because your client
told Dovecot to use the current timestamp when saving the messages.

And why would keeping the INTERNALDATE in mtime be bad? It only
changes if you write to the file. And existing mails must not be
modified or you'll get other problems as well.

Actually, it wasn't the client (Outlook) that told Dovecot. I rarely

think it was a result of my original migration from mbox (uw-imap) to
Maildir (uw-imap). I did this by having both IMAP servers (uw and
dovecot) accounts alive simultaneously in evolution and let evolution
copy from the uw-account to the dovecot-imap account. It could be
evolution's fault, but I thought it was doing an IMAP4 copy, in which

but maybe evolution was just doing its own thing.

save to my IMAP server from Outlook - only Thunderbird and Evolution. I case the INTERNALDATE should have been preserved according to the spec,

You had two servers. There's no trans-server COPY command, so the client has to fetch the messages from one server and save the messages to another using APPEND command, which takes a parameter to specify the INTERNALDATE.

So, before the

store for each mail.

migration, there was not even the concept of a timestamp on the uw- imap

With mboxes it's stored in the From-line for each message.

Unfortunately, dates can change unexpectedly - not just when you modify the file, as I move data around between machines as they become obsolete

and the wrong settings in the move can obliterate those mtimes - we
humans do make mistakes. Nevertheless, I am happy with my current
situation and at least understand what's going on.

Perhaps if you're not careful when copying. :) Anyway there isn't really any other good place to store the INTERNALDATE than mtime. Perhaps the timestamp in file name could be used, although maildir filenames aren't required to start with the timestamp so it should fallback to mtime then anyway.

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