132779 - Date displays as 1/1/1970 00:00 or 12/31/69 5:00 if message has no 'Date:' header

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 73565

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Russell Odom]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020311
BuildID:    2002031104

For a message that has no 'Date:' header, the value in the 'Date' column in the
top right pane is shown as 1/1/1970 00:00.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Send yourself a message with no 'Date:' header (no, I don't know how to do this!)
2. Look at date of the message

Actual Results:  Date shows as 1/1/1970 00:00

Expected Results:  Date should either show as N/A or similar, or the date on
which the mail was recieved (I imagine the latter is easier, and it would
certainly be more useful)

Comment 1

[Russell Odom]

Note: this isn't the same as bug 131983, since the messages in that bug do have
the 'Date:' header set.

Comment 2

[Markus Långström]

Related to/dupe of bug 32216?

Comment 3

[Russell Odom]

Hmm, possibly, that's about what to do if the Date header isn't valid. I'll post
a comment there in order to get someone informed enough to make a decision!

Comment 4

[marina]

Russell, would you please attach your message and i'll look at its source? Thanks.

Comment 5

[Russell Odom]

Attachment: Source of message with no Date header

As requested in comment 4

Comment 6

[Russell Odom]

FYI, Marina decided not to dupe this to bug 32216.

For all these date-related bugs, I suggest that we attempt to find a date for
the message in the following order:
1) The 'Date:' header, if it exists (this bug) and we can parse it OK (bug 32216
and bug 131983); then
2) The earliest date we can parse from a 'Received:' header; then
3) The date we received the message (just look at the From line in the message
file (not the 'From:' header of the message))

Notes
-----
Case 1: RFC822 requires that a 'Date:' header is present (see section 4.1), but
we are seeing that this isn't always the case :-)
Case 2: RCF822 does not require that any 'Received:' headers are present; it
does however require that a 'Received:' header contain a date (see section 4.1
for the format of a 'Received:' header and section 5.1 for the required format
of a date-time)
Case 3: This will always succeed, therefore we will always be able to get a
sensible date for any message

Comment 7

[R.K.Aa.]

This looks like a dup of bug 73565. (apart from that somewhere along the way,
there's been a "one minute" adjustment)

Comment 8

[Azrael AOD]

I see something very similar ... when I run out of disk space.. and my e-mail
program is open.. it still receives emial and tries to filter it to one of my
local folders. Obviously this won't succeed. But what does appear to happen
(this is second time) is a blank email.. no body/subject/date or any headers at
all appears in my filtered folder. The date shows as 01/01/70 01:00 because it
had no  date set.
However when I create disk space.. then delete this e-mail, it appears gone..
but when viewing other folders.. then coming back to that folder... it has
appeared again. The only way to rid myself of it was to nuke my profile and
start again.
This is probably a different bug to the one seen here... but does indicate a
method by which to receive mails with no date header.

Comment 9

[Greg K.]

*** Bug 160911 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Greg K.]

Bug 160911 was reported on Mac OS X; setting All/All and revising Summary.

Comment 11

[J Luh]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 73565 ***

Comment 12

[laurel]

marking verified as duplicate