Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decvax!virgin!zinn!mem
From: mem@zinn.MV.COM (Mark E. Mallett)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Preservation of posting date with smail2.5 and older-style headers
Message-ID: <305@zinn.MV.COM>
Date: 19 Apr 88 07:29:33 GMT
Organization: Zinn Computer Co., Litchfield NH
Lines: 42
Keywords: smail date

Zinn is running smail 2.5; some of our neighbors are not running smail but
are using standard (SysV) mailers.  I've noticed that ever since smail
has been used to receive mail from these neighbors, I can no longer tell
when that mail was written.  This is because of what smail does to the
headers.  The older-style mail is generated without a "Date:" field in the
header, instead the date and time is stamped on one of the various forms of
"from" lines inserted into the header.  smail takes out multiple from lines
and replaces them with a single one with a composite path gleaned from all
"from" lines that it finds.  In doing this, it loses all the time stamps:
the stamps from systems that the mail passes through, and most importantly
the original time stamp put on by the originating mailer.  The theory is, I
guess, that systems passing the mail should add a "Received:" line, and
that the originating system should have supplied a "Date:" line as well.

That all sounds fine, except that for every "from" line ripped out, without
a corresponding "Received" or "Date" line, information is lost.  The
biggest loss (to me) is the time of original posting.  Having this thrown
away is not very nice-- it seems to me that this is a critical part of the
information in the header.  Yes, I suppose that mailers ought to ensure
that a "Date:"  entry is generated in mail's header, but there are systems
out there that don't do this.  If smail is supposed to drop into place and
handle existing mail traffic, it ought to be able to do this without losing
this important piece of data.

Having said all that-- I made some slight modifications to my copy of
smail, so that it preserves the date found on the last "From" line and
inserts a "Date:" field if one is not present in the header.  This was a
fairly simple change; smail has code to make sure that fields are present,
I just made it so this code is always applied, and made it sensitive to the
type of mail being processed (local mail vs mail being routed elsewhere),
making particular fields mandatory depending on this context.  I am not
posting this change because I am not in a position to say that this is
absolutely correct behaviour, or to know that it won't break other
situations elsewhere in the network.  However, I would be interested in
hearing comments, such as whether this is a known problem, or whether there
is already a fix that I am not aware of.

-mm-
-- 
Mark E. Mallett  PO Box 4188/ Manchester NH/ 03103 
Bus. Phone: 603 645 5069    Home: 603 424 8129
uucp: mem@zinn.MV.COM  (...decvax!elrond!zinn!mem   or   ...sii!zinn!mem)
BIX: mmallett