Query about why 'wrong' date is showing

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vwnisus
Posts: 58
Joined: 2016-04-24 00:13:31

Query about why 'wrong' date is showing

Post by vwnisus »

I have just installed InfoClick trial version on a Mac with macOS 10.15 (Catalina).

After the indexing I did a search for files with the date 19 October 2019. It shows a large number of emails including the ones in the following screen shot:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0cd31pv98vper ... 1.png?dl=0

The date for the selected email is shown as "Date: Saturday, 19 October 2019 at 17:14:24 British Summer Time" in the preview window

But when the email is opened in Mail the date is shown as shown as "3 November 2015 at 07:16" which is the correct date when received.

See the second screen shot.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/66hdzvts5b4bf ... 2.png?dl=0

Is this correct?
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martin
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Re: Query about why 'wrong' date is showing

Post by martin »

Thank you for the screenshots and possible bug report. That certainly doesn't look correct. If Apple Mail is showing the date as Nov 2015, then InfoClick should not show Oct 2019.

My first suspicion is that the email is malformed, or perhaps the date is encoded in a non-standard format. In that situation InfoClick may fallback to using the file modification date, which might have no relation to the actual date of the email.

Could you please send us one of the misbehaving email files? You can use the contextual menu in InfoClick to reveal the .emlx file in the Finder. Thanks for your help!
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martin
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Re: Query about why 'wrong' date is showing

Post by martin »

After reviewing privately submitted sample emails, they confirm what I suspected: these emails are not standard. Specifically they are missing a date header entirely. This is why InfoClick falls back to using the email file modification time (as cached by Apple Mail), which doesn't necessarily have any relationship with the sent date.

We might be able to improve InfoClick to use a more sensible fallback date. I'll file this as a potential future enhancement. Thanks for your help!
vwnisus
Posts: 58
Joined: 2016-04-24 00:13:31

Re: Query about why 'wrong' date is showing

Post by vwnisus »

Thank you for helping in finding the cause of the problem.

The work around I found was to add in the contact field the contact name prefixed with a NOT. This removed all of the problem entries for that contact name/email address.
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