[quote user="Mark Irving"]Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 18:48:26 -0700 (GMT-07:00)[/quote]

As far as I can tell, comments in parentheses have always been allowed in the Date: field.  One of the things that 5322 did to 'clean it up' was to limit comments to the end of the date - which this format shows.

IMHO, over the years the rfc authors have made a complete mess of specifying these header fields (like Date:), and this is what we've ended up with!

I get some messages for which Pegasus Mail interprets the time part of the Date: header in a way the sender of the message did not intend. The discrepancy shows in the Date/Time column of the Folder view. Here's the relevant line from the headers of a message which arrived today:

Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 18:48:26 -0700 (GMT-07:00)

 ...and this is displayed and sorted in the Date/Time column as " 4 Jan 12,  7:00" rather than " 5 Jan 12,  1:48" as it should (my own time zone is +0000). I think the program which created the message intended the "(GMT-07:00)" to be treated as a comment, with no meaning for any program; Pegasus Mail has interpreted the numbers in brackets as a time of day.

The messages which show this effect generally come from eBay. The first-added Received: header in this example ends "Wed, 4 Jan 2012 18:48:26 -0700" and is between two addresses both ending ebay.com.

Could Pegasus Mail perhaps be made to interpret this format of date and time as its sender intended? I expect it is non-standard, but it might be useful to cope with such junk.

Mark

Why should Pegasus do that? There are so much ugly programers around the world and Pegasus should correct all their mistakes?

Contact ebay and tell them about their non-standard date-header and ask them to correct this. In standard there is no room for "intended comments" in that header.  I've done this many times the past 20 years and most times the mistake was corrected.

bye    Olaf

[quote user="FJR"]

Why should Pegasus do that? There are so much ugly programmers around the world and Pegasus should correct all their mistakes?

Contact eBay and tell them about their non-standard date-header and ask them to correct this. In standard there is no room for "intended comments" in that header. I've done this many times the past 20 years and most times the mistake was corrected.

bye    Olaf

[/quote]

I started looking up the standard (RFC 2822 Internet Message Format) ready to contact eBay, and now it seems to me that comments are allowed in the Date: header. That's section 3.6.1, the origination date field. It refers to 3.3 Date and Time Specification, which says

date-time = [ day-of-week "," ] date FWS time [CFWS]

the optional CWFS is defined as folding white space or comments (section 3.2.3). In this case, I don't think I have any right to complain to eBay. It looks as though Pegasus Mail is wrong to interpret my original example as it does. In other words,

Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 18:48:26 -0700 (GMT-07:00)

should be identical in meaning to

Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 18:48:26 -0700

If I have got this wrong, please explain so that I can quote the correct paragraphs in a nice clear message to eBay!

Mark

[quote user="FJR"]Why should Pegasus do that? There are so much ugly programers around the world and Pegasus should correct all their mistakes?[/quote]

The problem is most probably the other way round: David Harris has already applied so many workarounds that this is bound to fail sooner or later on another variant, be it legal or not.

You are quoting from older and replaced RFC. The current is RFC5322 and in it and in examples and in the Appendix section that old date/time syntax is obsolete and is no longer to be used.

[quote user="Jerry Wise"]You are quoting from older and replaced RFC. The current is RFC5322 and in it and in examples and in the Appendix section that old date/time syntax is obsolete and is no longer to be used.[/quote]

So I looked up RFC 5322 - Internet Message Format, and its current date-time syntax (section 3.3) still ends with an optional comment, in parentheses.

date-time = [ day-of-week "," ] date time [CFWS]

There is a comment in the Date: header of appendix A5, too. As it notes, "aesthetically displeasing, but perfectly legal." As far as my limited understanding goes, these messages I have been receiving have perfectly legal Date: headers.