355113 - Retention settings work on Date rather than Received: premature deletion possible

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Description

[Emmanuel Lesueur]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.5.0.7 (20060909) for XP

I received several POP3 messages with a bogus date header looking like :

Date: Tue,  GMT

and they are not displayed by Thunderbird. The messages are stored in the appropriate mailbox file by the filters, but they don't appear in the message list (with 'show all' mode) and can not be found by the search function.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Receive a message with the header entry 'Date: Tue,  GMT'

Actual Results:  
The message is not displayed

Expected Results:  
The message should be displayed, probably with the current date or with some 'Error' text in the date column.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

I tried reproducing this by editing a message in one of my folders; that message displays, but shows a date of 31-Dec-69 04:01 pm.  Are you still seeing this problem?

Comment 2

[Emmanuel Lesueur]

No, I can see those messages too now. It seems it was fixed in 1.5.0.9.

Comment 3

[Emmanuel Lesueur]

I did some more experiments, and it's actually not fixed but things are different that what I originally thought.

The problem actually is that when a folder has the property "remove messages older than xx days", messages are marked deleted before being displayed if they have a date older than that, and thus also if the date is invalid, in which case it is set to 1970 or so (systime=0 I guess).

I'm not sure what the proper behaviour should be here. On one hand you want junk mail deleted automatically after xx days even without being read, on the other hand a legitimate message from someone with a badly setup system time (not that unfrequent on mailing lists) could be lost unnoticed. A good solution would probably be to make the auto-delete feature work with the reception time instead of the Date: header.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #3)
> A good solution would probably be to make the auto-delete feature work with
> the reception time instead of the Date: header.

Trunk builds are currently storing the received date, rather than the value from the Date header, in the .MSF (index) file.  I just tested: that date in the index is the value used for checking whether to delete the 'old' message.  (You have to actually receive a message using the trunk, or, for POP, at least, rebuild the index, in order for the received date to be stored.  This is, specifically, the date of the last, topmost, Received: header in the message.)  See bug 166254.

The possible drawback is that the Date value displayed in the column is usually not identical, and occasionally very different from, the Date header shown in the message -- see bug 341548.

See bug 227848 for a similar issue with junk mail purging.

Comment 5

[Saïvann Carignan]

I don't know about dev. branches, but this bug still exist in thunderbird 3.0b2