Fwd: date received

[John A. Tamplin]

Jon Rowell wrote:

>> I am working on converting from unix mail spools to cyrus.  I have 
>> pretty much everything working except for after I get things 
>> converted and startup cyrus and people download the messages to their 
>> client the "Date Received" (that's what my mac email client calls 
>> it... outlook express calls it "Received") for every message is set 
>> to the time that the message was converted to cyrus format.  Is it 
>> possible to change this value to either the Date: header of the 
>> message or the date/time mentioned in the Received: header?  Anything 
>> is better than 3am on whatever date I ran my conversion program.
>
Not that I know of, other than deleting the message and reissuing an 
append command with the proper date.

>> Some notes on how I'm doing my conversion.  I am using more or less 
>> the same process that is described in the O'Reilly "Managing Imap" 
>> book which creates all of the mailboxes for you, splits each spool up 
>> using formail, copies into individual files for cyrus and then when 
>> we're all done runs "reconstruct -r".  I would expect reconstruct to 
>> reset this date received for me but it doesn't.
>
The problem is that the IMAP internal date is not present in the message 
itself.  Depending on what your old mail server was, the flags and seen 
state won't be there either (and even if they are Cyrus reconstruct 
won't know what to do with them), so any method of converting the plain 
messages into Cyrus will lose this data.

>> Anybody know anything about this?  I haven't run across this issue 
>> anywhere on the web.   Is everyone simply happy getting the message 
>> there with the wrong date received?
>
I was first doing something similar, and then decided to go with UW 
IMAP's mbxcvt and run it on the raw spool files (since we were upgrading 
from UW IMAP).  It properly copies the internal date and all the flags.

>> Also, what raw command is given to the imap server in order to 
>> retrieve this information?
>
fetch internaldate

-- 
John A. Tamplin
Unix Systems Administrator