1911017 - email "Received" times do not match those shown by Outlook.live and BlueMail

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1911916

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Greg Albrecht]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0

Steps to reproduce:

In the message list, the "Received" time shown by Thunderbird caught my eye because the times were sometimes much earlier than when the email arrived. Some emails arrived and were placed earlier in the list than emails that had already arrived and been read.

This is Thunderbird 128.0.1esr on Windows 10

Actual results:

This occurred on a Hotmail account. So I went to Outlook.live and viewed the messages. The times made sense in Outlook.live compared to the Received time in Thunderbird. The times shown by Outlook.live were frequently different than the Received time shown by Thunderbird.

Expected results:

I viewed the received email message source to investigate. Every email has a number of "Received: " lines which include timestamps.

It looks like Outlook.live is using the timestamp from the very FIRST "Received:" line when it shows the received time. This represents the latest time in the email's journey thru the mail system which seems appropriate.

But it looks like Thunderbird is using the very LAST "Received:" line prior to the "From: " line. This time can be (significantly) earlier than the first "Received:" timestamp due to transport/queuing in the mail system.

The 8-10 emails where this timestamp caught my eye were significantly delayed at one of the mail hubs. That delay brought out this time discrepancy. The fact that these incorrectly timed emails were placed earlier in the message list is concerning. Also, when telling someone "look at the email that arrived at 8:33pm", it would be most helpful if the received times matched regardless of which email client is being used (exceptions for TZ of course).

Comment 1

[Greg Albrecht]

The BlueMail email client shows the same Received times as Outlook.

Comment 2

[Greg Albrecht]

Most of the time, the 2 different "Received:" timestamps being described here are probably very similar if all sites in the mail infrastructure are working properly. The timestamps in a set of emails I received were quite different due to a published Microsoft Azure DDoS attack. Reports indicate that "Outlook emails were delayed". This attack likely led to the large differences between the 2 timestamps. As described earlier, several other email clients rely on the later time.

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Should be better after bug 1911916.