Re: Date in mail headers
On 4 Sep 1997, Carey Evans wrote:
> Olaf Weber <infovore@xs4all.nl> writes:
>
> > RFC822 would be the appropriate one here, and it does impose some
> > restrictions regarding what can and cannot be a date header:
>
> [snip]
>
> > So it certainly looks like Orn needs to fix his mailer.
I agree. I think it's screwing up the interaction of our IMAP server and
Debian pine 3.96 - I keep getting "bogus date" errors.
> RFC2047 is also applicable - it's responsible to the mangled addresses
> you see sometimes if you MUA isn't aware of the proposed standard.
> However, I don't think it should be applied to Date: headers.
I agree. Dates are not "text", nor "phrase", and only these can be encoded.
> Also, I note that RFC822 defines the day part of a date as only the
> English names, not something like "Mið" (however that turns out when
> TM and various MTA's get done with it). And the only valid
> non-numeric time zones are: UT GMT EST EDT CST CDT MST MDT PST PDT, or
> a single letter except J (not "BST").
I wrote a DOS perl script a while back to make reading mailbox files
tolerable without an MUA (i.e. with less). It stripped out almost all the
headers, and to make up for the lack of an index to the messages, it
sorted them by Date:. Naturally it had to make sense of the timezones,
and these were the ones used I filtered from one week's contributions on
debian-user:
@timezonenames = ("+1200 NZST",
"+1000 EST",
"+0930 CST",
"+0900 JST",
"+0800 WST",
"+0400 MSD",
"+0200 SAT",
"+0200 CEST",
"+0100 MET", "+0200 MET DST",
"-0000 GMT", "+0000 GMT", "+0100 BST",
"-0300 SAT",
"-0400 AST",
"-0500 EST", "-0400 EDT",
"-0600 CST", "-0500 CDT",
"-0700 MST", "-0600 MDT",
"-0800 PST", "-0700 PDT");
There were also some bizarre ones like SGT, but I couldn't add them to my
dataset unless I could work out what they were. Note that some, like EST
and CST are ambiguous (in the emails, not in the RFC), so I put the most
likely/legal ones last in my array to overwrite the others.
As far as I know, I think I'm guilty of using BST, and even bst, from
Debian and PC- pine, but only in parentheses. (For Lindsay, BST is
British Summer Time.)
--
David Wright, Open University, Earth Science Department, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
U.K. email: d.wright@open.ac.uk tel: +44 1908 653 739 fax: +44 1908 655 151
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