Openmail date question....

[Kathleen]

I had a user report that she got an email and the date that showed up in the main InBox window, with the message details, showed the correct date of when she got it. When she opened the message, it listed a September date inside the message window. Why would this happen....is it some type of fluke? This is the only message I know of that she has had problems with.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

OpenMail logs the time of receipt of the message into the database and that's what shows up when you list the InBox. However, when you open a message, you are now looking at the information that was stamped into the headers when the message was sent, including different timezones.

There is a lot of flexibility in mail headers (or is it lack of standards conformance) for different mail agents so there may (or may not) be a complete set of SMTP headers to read. These headers will show the timestamp of the origination of the message along with a timezone code. And of course, the sender may have the date/time set way wrong (days or even years out of whack).