Re: [Exim] Re: correction of Date-header

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Author: Robert Lister
Date:  
To: Sven Geggus
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Re: correction of Date-header
On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 07:21:09AM +0000, Sven Geggus wrote:
> James P. Roberts <punster@???> wrote:
>
> > If your users have Windoze machines, check out Dimension 4, a freeware
> > package for synching time to a remote source. Then run ntpd (network time
> > protocol daemon) on your server, and slave them to it.
>
> I don't care about the Windoze machines.
>
> BTW, it has been quite simple to rewrite the Date in the remote_smtp
> transport using these two statements:
>
> headers_remove = Date
> headers_add = Date: ${run{/bin/date -R}}


I think exim adds a date there if there's no date header present in any case.

I've never tried to remove the client's date header.

Always a bit wary of doing things like this, as any problems or backlogs
would get re-dated and therefore it would make it more difficult
(especially for users/legal beagles) to prove what is going on if a delay
of some sort occurred, although the sending client sent it with a date, the
server would then replace that header as though it had been resent.

Arguments could ensue over a Date header if somebody claims they sent an
e-mail, recipient then gets it two days later, with the later date on it.
User swears blind the sent it two days ago, recipient produces a copy with
the munged date on it that was dated whenever the server sent it.
(Or would it do the header replace only when it was initially queued and
not finally sent? i.e. If a message was sent to multiple recipients,
would each one have a different time on it?)

It is a much better solution if possible to set the correct date on the
clients in the first place, windows clients can be something like achron
(Which can just be run from a login script to synch the time from
somewhere - usually the client's default router if it supports NTP)

If this is not possible then what you should do is try and put the
original date back in to the e-mail like:

X-Original-Date: (the original date)
X-Warning: server modified the date and time
Date: replaced date

I'm sure this is not beyond exim's capability to do something like this.

Rob

--
Robert Lister    -        robl@???