I have the followign bash script to update mtimes for maildir files:
#!/bin/bash for i in /test/emailfile do date=$(sed -n '/Received: from/ { :a; n; /;/ {s/.*; //p;q}; b a }' '$i') newdate=$(date -d '$date' +'%Y%m%d%H%M.%S') touch -t '$newdate' '$i' done This script has always worked fine, with standard headers like these:
Delivery-date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:15:13 -0600 Received: from an-out-0708.google.com ([209.85.132.243]) by x.xxxx.com with esmtp (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from <xxxxxx@gmail.com>) id 1HfVLs-0002Io-RQ for x@xxxxx.com; Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:15:13 -0600 Which has a 2007 delivery date. If I touch that file so the file date is from today, and then run my script, the file date is restored to the received from date.
However, when attempting to run my script on an email with the following headers:
Delivery-date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:26:37 -0800 Received: from xxxxxx ([130.194.13.165]) by xxxxxxx with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from <xxxxxi@xxxxx.xxx.xx>) id 1LCOhp-0006fm-2g for xxxxx@xxxxxx.com; Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:26:37 -0800 The date is apparantly not restored. I can not see that the headers are obviously different in any way. I need to reset the mtimes, because many mail clients use the filetime to display as the received from time. My script has worked on over 3000 emails, ensuring all clients displays the emails in the right order aftr moving servers and all files having the same date, but for some reason it will not work on a particular email. Have I left something obvious out of the script?
edit: the date is apparently restored from the script, however clients that rely on mtimes will not display this message regardless of what the script sets the date to. The permissions are the same, as is the layout and filename format. Below is a posting from ls -la
-rw-rw---- 1 username username 11769 Dec 14 21:25 1229318728.H329820P11297.xxxxx.serverxxxxx.com:2,S -rw-rw---- 1 username username 3366 Dec 15 17:26 1229390797.H476913P25671.xxxxx.serverxxxxx.com:2,S -rw-rw---- 1 username username 1149 Dec 22 05:39 1229953142.H901034P11016.xxxxx.serverxxxxx.com:2,S -rw-rw---- 1 username username 7557 Dec 23 15:43 1230075791.H700954P8392.xxxxx.serverxxxxx.com:2,S The file that will not display correctly is the second from the top. Is there any way to debug why this is happening at all?
It appears to work fine for me, try this little ditty and see what you get.
I get (as expected):
So I’m not sure why yours isn’t working, although the output of that script should be a good starting point.
The other thing you can do is temporarily modify your script as follows:
This will output the actual command you’re trying.
Also check file permissions on the directory and individual files.
What does ‘ls -l’ (mtime) and ‘ls -lc’ (ctime) give you on the actual suspect mail file? It may be that your script is working fine vut the users email client is not using the mtime/ctime.
After edit:
Quoting ‘however clients that rely on mtimes will not display this message regardless of what the script sets the date to’, my response is that the client is not relying on mtimes.
Paraphrasing Sherlock himself, once you have eliminated all the other possibilities, whatever’s left, however unlikely, must be the case. And one thing I noticed: did you just state that the message isn’t being displayed at all (or that it’s got the wrong date as I’ve thought we were talking about)?
If the latter, you need to look into the mail client to see where it’s actually getting its date from. Just out of interest, what date does the client think it is (and does it match any date within the header?
If the former, that’s a different problem we can discuss.
I think that’s (the client) where you need to go from here and, since my expertise is more in scripting than email clients, I may not be able to help further. Still, I’m interested to see how it turns out, so I’ll favorite this question.