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 --There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
-- Ed Howdershelt
pgpkhrM5EzitC.pgp
Description: PGP signature
