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Re: Timezone in mbox separator (From) line


From: Kurt Hackenberg
Subject: Re: Timezone in mbox separator (From) line
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2020 23:53:28 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.5.0

On 2020-10-06 20:00, Ken Olum wrote:

I'm using exim and have done nothing special to configure exim's
timezone handling.  When it delivers to a mbox-format file, it writes
the separator line at the the beginning of the message with the
local time and no timezone.  This seems to be wrong.  According to
RFC4155's specification of the "default" mbox format, this should be in
UTC (with no timezone marker).  Indeed squirrelmail using imap reports
this time incorrectly.

So I guess I should get exim to use UTC for that line, except that the
mailutils "mail" program uses the time from there unaltered.  If imap
thinks that this line is in UTC, shouldn't mail think that also and
convert it to local time before displaying it?


RFC 4155 is not definitive. In fact, as far as I know, that variant of mbox has never been implemented.

Note that RFC 4155 doesn't define a file format. It defines a MIME type, a way to encode data on the network, that is similar to a file format that's common on Unix systems. The IETF is only about the internet. The IETF considers how received mail is stored, or even whether it's stored, to be a local matter, outside the purview of the IETF.

Mbox is not really standardized. It has become a de facto standard -- well, several de facto standards. It has four or five major variants, and many lesser variants, all partially incompatible.

Here's what Wikipedia says about mbox:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox>

From looking at mail I've received into mbox files, the time in the From_ line seems to be mostly local time, though sometimes it's UTC. If I remember, I saw 80-90% local time. The most common syntax for that time is the same as what's produced by the C library function ctime(); that function produces local time.

I'm surprised that squirrelmail even looks at the time in the mbox From_ line. I'd expect it to use the time in the message's Date: header.



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