sparkle wrote
The email that got through to me had the current date - Sun, 11 Sep 2016 19:50
Are you sure we are talking about the same thing?
I am referring to a date found in the normally invisible header lines of an email, usually accessed with a "View source" option. The date line in this mornings Nabble Support Digest looked like this:
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2016 01:00:04 -0700 (MST)
Note how this gives a time to one hundredth of a second and a time zone adjustment correction figure and may include a time zone code.
A correctly formatted date header allows your email program to translate it to show a time in your local time zone. So Thunderbird, my email program, currently shows this as:
09:00
but as the message gets older it will begin to display the date as well.
Although subscriptions, whether digests or not, that come from Nabble do include a proper date line in the headers, messages generated in the "Send Email to xxxxx" screen do not.
I believe some email servers may add some form of date line when it is missing as they process any mail. Others certainly do not. Handling of undated mail is then down to the email program of the recipient.
In investigating this - I've only recently changed to Thunderbird, having adopted Linux as my OS - I see that during processing any mail Thunderbird adds a header line to all incoming mail. The one for this morning's Support digest reads:
From - Wed Sep 14 09:06:31 2016
My best guess is that this is generated and prefixed to the existing header lines at the time that my copy of Thunderbird polls the server for new mail, as I first read the message up to an hour later that 09:06.
However I have not got to the bottom of it, as I know that Thunderbird does initially show emails from Nabble that I copy to myself as dated 1/1/1970, but later changes this, displaying such messages with a time taken from that added "From - " line. I don;t know at what stage this happens.
I know that other programs handle undated mail differently. My previous mail program (I still co-ordinate the software's development team) would leave the mail undated. Undated mail was always treated as infinitely old and given my settings, which showed most recent mail at the top of the list, it placed undated mail at the bottom of the list. Very frustrating - even after I realised what was going on.
Incidentally, GMail is quite appalling at the way it handles mail, obeying almost none of the appropriate RFCs. It means there is all kinds of code in my old program just to handle the odd things that GMail does. Apple's email program is almost equally weird in different ways. Don't you just hate big corporations that think everyone works the way they want you to.
The point is that Nabble really need to correct their code and add a properly formatted date line to outgoing emails. Until they do that email handling will be unreliable. Both arrival itself and processing after arrival will depend on the servers any mail pass through and the recipients email program.
Volunteer Helper - but recommending that users move off the platform!
Once the admin for GregHelp now deleted.
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