On 4/11/23 13:46, Yachay Wayllukuq via agora-discussion wrote:
Is the timestamp of the mailing list itself the one that appears on the archive website?
So if you download an email and open it in plaintext, or click "view headers" or "view source" on your client, you will see a ton of metadata attached to every email. Among that is the complete route it took from the sender's computer to the receiver's computer. Each stop has a timestamp on it.
Your client itself will normally display the timestamp attached by the sending machine. This is usually assumed to be honest, but could actually be forged (to amusing results, such as pushing a new email way back in your inbox because it reports and old date, I believe ais523 or someone else actually did this for an email in the archives). The archives also use this date I believe.
A court could also choose to use this time, but it could be forged. They might instead use the first time reported by the next machine, which is extremely unlikely to be forged. Or they might use the time the list actually received it. All of those options are in the header of every email, and they all seem to have good arguments for and against them.
So it's an interestingly complex question, actually. In practice tho, all of those times are likely to be less than a second or two from each other, so the majority of the time the winner will be obvious anyway.
-- nix Prime Minister, Herald
