[power142]

I've got a number of old (and some not so old) mailboxes in mbox format that I'm trying to import into Mail in Tiger. When I import them using either of the methods below, Mail displays the 'Date Received' as the date the messages were imported, rather than the original date listed in the 'Received:' field in the header. If I click on a message, the 'Date' is listed correctly in the message pane, but still lists the imported time in the message list.

I've tried two things so far:

1) copying via an intermediate IMAP server using Thunderbird

2) using 'Import->Other...' in Mail to import the the mbox files (with the original UNIX timestamps intact)

I've also tried Mail in 10.3.9 and get the same results.

Thunderbird displays the correct received date in #1, whereas Mail displays the same date for all imported messages. I could just import everything into Thunderbird and be done with it, but I prefer Mail. Very puzzling

Anybody have any ideas how I can get around this, or is this a documented Mail bug?

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by power142

I've got a number of old (and some not so old) mailboxes in mbox format that I'm trying to import into Mail in Tiger. When I import them using either of the methods below, Mail displays the 'Date Received' as the date the messages were imported, rather than the original date listed in the 'Received:' field in the header. If I click on a message, the 'Date' is listed correctly in the message pane, but still lists the imported time in the message list.

I've tried two things so far:

1) copying via an intermediate IMAP server using Thunderbird

2) using 'Import->Other...' in Mail to import the the mbox files (with the original UNIX timestamps intact)

I've also tried Mail in 10.3.9 and get the same results.

Thunderbird displays the correct received date in #1, whereas Mail displays the same date for all imported messages. I could just import everything into Thunderbird and be done with it, but I prefer Mail. Very puzzling

Anybody have any ideas how I can get around this, or is this a documented Mail bug?

Are these messages that you received in the past, or are they ones that you SENT?

Because if they're messages you sent, they're actually not "compliant" mail messages. They never went through a mail server, so they weren't stamped with the proper delivery headers. As such, they will all have the date of the import on them.

This is just the way the mail standard works, and there's not much you can do about it, retroactively. If you want "compliant" messages that will always transfer easily, you should bcc yourself on every message, and delete the stuff out of your "sent" folder as it's not true compliant email.

If these are messages you actually received and are having this problem, something is fishy, as I've never seen it.

[power142]

Thanks for the info. The messages in question are messages I've received over the years to various IMAP accounts, I'm resigned to the Sent messages being upset. The first thing I did when I noticed the oddity was to check the mail headers and they are unchanged.

I've tried a few other things and repeated my original exercise and it seems I was wrong... when importing directly from mbox files, I can see the correct date but the read status is lost. I appreciate that these are two different issues.

One other odd thing I found today by using a different IMAP server than the one before, is that it is Mail doing this and not the IMAP server giving false information, or at least I think so. The reason I speculate is that having copied the same mailbox to two different IMAP servers, one running Panther server (running Cyrus IMAP) and the other running Linux (running UW IMAP), I get the same results - Mail gets the dates wrong, whereas Thunderbird gets them right