Re: fixing email dates

[Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Saturday, April 18 at 10:43 AM, quoth Paul E Condon:
> I had thought that I could edit into the email a Date: header with 
> the correct date,

Yup, that's the way to do it.

Let me guess: you edited the message outside of mutt, and you use 
header caching. When you relaunched mutt, it didn't think the message 
had changed, since the filename was the same (which is an assumption 
it makes about Maildir messages), so it simply used the cached value 
of the Date header when rendering the index list.

> but that doesn't seem to work, for me. I still get the Unix Epoch in 
> the index display. I have editted in both Date: and Delivery-date: 
> headers. I can see them when I open an email and visually read the 
> headers. But I want that date to appear in the index as well.

That date also gets stored in the header cache.

> Where does Mutt get the date that it displays in 'index-format'?

It gets it from the Date header.

> What is the correct format for that date?

It's the format specified in section 5 of RFC 822. 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0822.txt

> What does Mutt do with emails for which it cannot parse the date?

It uses the epoch.

> Is there a secret database somewhere in which Mutt keeps what it 
> thinks it the real date? Etc. Etc...

Nope. But mutt can cache the date header (if you told it to).

~Kyle
- -- 
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
                                                         -- Oscar Wilde
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