[horde] IMP sort by date

Thu Aug 24 11:56:51 PDT 2006

Hrm, that doesn't seem to make sense either.  Here's a snippet from
the inbox page in IMP:

2446	 09:54:04 AM ...
223	 02/21/2002	...
224	 02/21/2002	...
339	 12/31/1903	...
2445	 06:32:26 AM ...

I got into my IMAP server (Cyrus, btw) and asked for the INTERNALDATE
fields of these five messages.  (As an aside, it's remarkably helpful
to have the message numbers right there.  Thanks, Horde team!)  Here's
what I got:

* 2446 FETCH (INTERNALDATE "24-Aug-2006 09:55:30 -0500")
* 223 FETCH (INTERNALDATE "20-Aug-2006 09:32:03 -0500")
* 224 FETCH (INTERNALDATE "20-Aug-2006 09:32:03 -0500")
* 339 FETCH (INTERNALDATE "20-Aug-2006 09:32:04 -0500")
* 2445 FETCH (INTERNALDATE "24-Aug-2006 06:32:34 -0500")

As you can see, messages 2445 and 2446 are sorted correctly, but the
others all have INTERNALDATEs of several days ago, when we migrated to
Cyrus -- they don't have INTERNALDATEs between 6:32 am and 9:55 am
today.  Why would they be sorted as if they were?

Chris St. Pierre
Unix Systems Administrator
Nebraska Wesleyan University

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006, Andrew Morgan wrote:

> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006, Chris St. Pierre wrote:
>
>> One of my users has a few messages in her inbox that do not get sorted
>> properly by date.  The messages are old, all received in 2002,
>> although one has a bogus date header from 1904 (!).  Yet all of them
>> sort as though they were received today.  This doesn't happen in other
>> MUAs.
>>
>> What could be causing this strange sort?  What header field (or
>> combination thereof) does IMP consider when sorting by date?
>
> Generally, IMAP clients (including IMP) sort by the IMAP INTERNALDATE field,
> which has nothing to do with the Date: header on the email itself. The
> INTERNALDATE field is generally the arrival time of the message to the email
> system (maybe the unix datestamp on the file, if you are using something like
> Cyrus, Maildir, etc).  In any case, you'll need to look at your IMAP server to
> see why this is happening.  Perhaps the mailbox is "corrupted" in some fashion.
>
> 	Andy
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