Mail import date stuck at 8 Oct 2006

EagleFiler
1

I have just started playing with EagleFiler to see if it can act as a search engine for mailing list archives I have.

The archives are text files and seem to follow the “standard” mbox format.

I selected a bunch of these files and duly imported them to EagleFiler.

All seemed to work well. Each file was recognised as a mailbox and eaxh message was correctly made into a single record.
However on closer examination I noticed that from a certain point on, the modified dates of all the messages were identical.

Further, when I looked at these messages, they had in their “Date” field, this same modification date. The date in question being “8 October 2006 4:49:44 AM” for the first mailbox and then the same date, one minute later for the next and so on and so on.

BUT, if I look at the text files I imported, they have the correct dates against each message.

This being in the first "From " line.
eg. “From Zzyzx@relia.net Wed Nov 21 09:30:29 2001”

Yet once in EagleFiler the date reads: 8 October 2006 4:49:44 AM

Looking through the files, any date before 9 October 2006 is affected.

In other words, all dates later than 12:00 AM on the 9th of Oct 2006, get read in correctly. Its almost as if the date field gets stuck once October 8 is hit.

This actually happens within one file and all subsequent files end up with the October date.

I thought it might be a buffer thing so imported once more a single file with dates pre the stuck one, but no, they too were all changed to 8 Oct. 206

Any thoughts?

Is this a bug?

2

Would it be possible for you to e-mail me one of the mbox files so that I can look into this? Also, please note that EagleFiler reads the date from the “Date” header, not the “From ” line.

3

On its way, thanks.

Interesting about taking the “date” from the Date: header.
I thought that given the first "From " line (not From: header) was the only fully defined format )at least as far as I could find) it wold have been a safer bet.

4

I think you have that backwards. The date in the “From ” line is a convention that not all software follows. (Only the “From ” characters are required to interoperate with other software that uses the mbox format.) The “Date” header is defined by an RFC and is universally present.

5

I looked at the 2001-11a.mbox file that you sent, and it really does say “Date: Sun Oct 8 04:49:44 2006” in every message. So I think the file, not EagleFiler, is in error here.

By the way, other mbox files I’ve seen generated by Mailman have correct dates. I wonder how this file was created and if the messages were imported from another system and changed in that process.

6

Yes, it is my source files that are in error!

The mbox files were created by the archive feature of a list manager (mailman I think) and therein lies the issue.

Although the first line of each message is correct, the archival process seems to have rewritten the date of the post and set it to Oct 8.

So, using the “Date:” header to grab the date correctly grabs the INCORRECTLY SET date value.

I wasn’t looking at this header as I was concentrating on the first line only.

The problem is thus in the raw archive mboxes I am using.

I will run BBedit over the files to correct this (if I can :-))

7

I’ve imported lots of mailboxes from Mailman’s archive feature (including a test, just now, of the EagleFiler mailing list) and they always have the correct Date header. So I don’t think Mailman, by itself, is the cause of the problem.

8

no matter.

I was able to fix the offending files (BBedit is really quite fast, 86 files totalling 275MB - less than 30 secs.)

Having imported the files correctly I can see that EagleFiler gives me exactly what I wanted.

Thanks. I just purchased a license :slight_smile: