Dealing with Missing Date Headers

Dealing with Missing Date Headers

[Kevin Foley]

Hi,

Has anyone ever dealt with missing "Date" headers?  My emails from Etrade
in particular are missing them for whatever reason.

My only thought is to possibly use `sed` or something similar to add a
"Date" header based on the dates in one of the "Received" headers but
I'm not crazy about this idea.

I also plan to reach out to Etrade to see if they'll resolve it for
future messages.

Thanks,
Kevin

Re: Dealing with Missing Date Headers

[David Bremner]

Kevin Foley <kevin@kevinjfoley.me> writes:

> Has anyone ever dealt with missing "Date" headers?  My emails from Etrade
> in particular are missing them for whatever reason.
>
> My only thought is to possibly use `sed` or something similar to add a
> "Date" header based on the dates in one of the "Received" headers but
> I'm not crazy about this idea.
>
> I also plan to reach out to Etrade to see if they'll resolve it for
> future messages.

If you access to .forward style processing on the delivery host (a
relatively uncommon case, but perhaps less so among notmuch users) then
adding time of delivery could be done by piping messages through

formail -a $(date -R)

formail is part of procmail; if that is not available the functionality
could probably be replaced by a short python script, which would likely
be more robust than a sed pipeline.

Re: Dealing with Missing Date Headers

[Ralph Seichter]

* Kevin Foley:

> Has anyone ever dealt with missing "Date" headers? My emails from Etrade
> in particular are missing them for whatever reason.

Amazing, and not in a good way. There are only two required email
headers, and Etrade manages to screw this up? Quoting RFC 5322
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5322#section-3.6 :

  The only required header fields are the origination date field and the
  originator address field(s). All other header fields are syntactically
  optional.

This is something the message sender has to fix.

-Ralph