[Mailman-Users] list archives

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Simon writes:
 > On 7/17/2008, Mark Sapiro (mark at msapiro.net) wrote:
 > > See the documentation in Defaults.py for the settings
 > > 
 > > ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY = 2 
 > 
 > Ah, perfect, thanks... so setting it to 1 will always use the received date.
 > 
 > I'm wondering what the disadvantages to this are - assuming the server 
 > date/time is always correct?

The main disadvantage AFAICS is that the Date header is an author
header according to the standards; mail handlers should pass it
through unchanged.

Practically, mail is somewhat unreliable (more so, these days).  In a
large archive, you will surely see many messages where some hop
introduced a delay of many hours.  It is sometimes useful in forensics
(eg, identifying spam -- IIRC some of the pump and dump spams were
deliberated postdated so that more victims would think they were
looking at very fresh information).

Finally, any time you add something that changes the message you add
potential for bugs.  Also, by changing the message you may make it
less reliable as evidence should that be necessary.