IF you want definitions, I suggest you read the relevant RFC as that is where the header field are discussed. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-2.2

Date is the date and time the email was sent by the sender, stored in the header in UTC time with an offset.

Hi, Matt.

Yes, I'm very familiar with the RFC, having first written my own e-mail client some 20+ years ago. But the RFC defines Internet text message headers and those headers have no necessary relationship to Thunderbird column headers. For example, the 'Correspondents' column header has no clear direct match to a specific message header.

There are many potential "dates" associated with an e-mail item. And under various circumstances, bizarre date values show up such as Jan 1 1970 (a fairly obvious value) or blank which is more confusing.

I was pretty sure that the 'Date:' header was the preferred source for the "Date" column. Examining source mostly confirms that for well-formed e-mail items. For badly formed items, the question changes to whether or not other possible values might be extracted and displayed.

And the question is larger because there are 19 available column headers (in this Thunderbird client). "Date" is just an example that should be well defined but that sometimes seems unclear.

Hence -- is there documentation specific to Thunderbird?

Perhaps the available "documentation" is the Thunderbird source code, though that could be the long way around regardless of being authoritative.

Tom

Correspondents was a divisive change and there are two bugs in bugzilla with volumes of discussion. It is not documented as such, and nor are any of the other headings except in the source.

Date is the RFC Date header. Received is the RFC received time at the local mail server.

We still consider the appearance of 1 January 1970 to be indicative of corruption and a cause for alarm. A missing value is one thing, but a date value of zero is not normal even with malformed emails.

Missing dates are common. The internet is full of folk that think they can write a mail and send it using javascript, PHP, Ruby etc. What I see is a lot of non compliant mail. Even from sources that should know much better, Like Mozilla and Microsoft. I even understand Skype is not immune. Sending emails without a date header.

But you are welcome to document that information. We have a knowledge base that is always desperate for new contributors. Perhaps you could be one.

Okay, understood.

You're right. If I don't do it, it might remain undone.

Thanks for clarifying the situation.

Tom

tomliotta said

Okay, understood. You're right. If I don't do it, it might remain undone. Thanks for clarifying the situation. Tom

My time is extremely limited and I am a poor technical writer, but I find myself doing a lot of the article work that gets done. But that is how it is in a community project. Lots of jobs and no warm bodies.