[imp] local mail and mbox' From-line

[Daan Mervielde]

Hi,

(First of all: my apologies if the problem I'm describing is not
imp/horde related).

I've noticed a problem when sending local mail with imp 3.1 (I have a
shared hosting account). The problem only occurs when sending mail to
accounts on my domain *and* when the language upon login is Nederlands
(=Dutch). There's no problem when I choose English (US).

The problem seems to be caused by the date part of the "From " line
(first line of a message in mbox format). The time stamp of such lines
is in a Dutch format, and causes confusion with the emailclients I use
(this includes imp/horde itself). The clients don't parse such lines as
the beginning of a new message, but they display it as plain text under
the preceeding message in the inbox.

Here's an example (I've put in a "--" at the beginnning of each line to
prevent confusion by emailclient; I also replaced domains with
nonexistant ones). The first message was sent with a mailclient, the
second is the one I sent to myself with imp/horde, and isn't properly
recognized by the mailclients I use (note the different format of
timestamps in the "From " lines of the 2 messages).


--From someone at some_isp.be Mon Feb 10 07:02:27 2003
--Return-path: <someone at some_isp.be>
[...snip rest of headers + message...]

--From cpanel at xyz.org ma feb 10 07:04:15 2003
--Return-path: <cpanel at xyz.org>
--Envelope-to: daan at my_domain.com
--Delivery-date: ma, 10 feb 2003 07:04:15 -0500
--Received: from cpanel by hazel.xyz.org with local (Exim 3.36 #1)
	id 18iCfX-0004lG-00
	for daan at my_domain.com; Mon, 10 Feb 2003 07:04:15 -0500
--Received: from 127.0.0.1 ( [127.0.0.1])
	as user daan at my_domain.com@localhost by www.my_domain.com with HTTP;
	Mon, 10 Feb 2003 13:04:15 +0100
--Message-ID: <1044878655.3e47953f8b306 at www.my_domain.com>
--Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 13:04:15 +0100
--From: Daan Mervielde <daan at my_domain.com>
--To: daan at my_domain.com
--Subject: horde/imp test
--MIME-Version: 1.0
--Content-Type: text/plain
--Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
--User-Agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 3.1
--X-Originating-IP: 127.0.0.1

test


I'm really not sure who's responsible for the "From " line, but my bet
was imp, since the timestamp format clearly depends on the language
chosen. I also noted that some emailclients are more forgiving than
others. For example: Mozilla recognizes a day as 3 letters (hence the
from line with "ma" isn't recognized as the beginning of a new message),
whereas Mutt seems more `strict' (only recognizes English format like
Mon, Tue etc).

I realize that the mbox format is not really standarized (as in
rfc-like), but the implementations I've tested all have to some extent
problems with non-english date formats.

Has anyone seen this behaviour, any comments? Or is this totally imp
unrelated (I only experience the problem with local mail sent with
imp/horde)?

Thanks for your input.