Re: Problems with $DATE$

[Earl Hood <earl@earlhood.com>]

On October 23, 2002 at 10:07, tomas.halvarsson@fra.se wrote:

> I'm having trouble generating a good main index page for my
> mailing lists. Whenever I generate such a page, and use the
> $DATE$ resource variable to display the dates for messages, it
> seems as if $DATE$ is picking the date from the "From ..."
> separator line, and not the Date: header, in conflict with the
> "Why doesn't MHonArc extract the date from "From ..." line?"
> question in the FAQ.

The value of $DATE$ is dependent on the DATEFIELDS resource.
And it is true that the From separator is not used.  The default
DATEFIELDS resource specifies to extract the date of a message
from Received header field.

Note if you change DATEFIELDS, the change only will affect
new message added and not existing ones.

> I'm currently in the process of setting up the web archive, and
> have a lot of old messages I'd like to include in the archive. I
> use the following command:
> 	formail -s procmail < ~/Mail/mailinglist
> to try and generate the archive. My .procmailrc has a recipe that
> creates directories and runs
> 	| mhonarc -rcfile ... -outdir ... -add
> for each mail that fits. And up to this point, everything works
> OK.

Have you looked into mharc, <http://www.mhonarc.org/mharc/>, which
automates alot of this type of stuff?

> The troubles seem to occur in <LITEMPLATE> in the resource file.
> I have (quite desperately, to try and figure out what is going
> on) tried every date related resource variable ($DATE$,
> $DDMMYYYY$, $GMTDATE$, $LOCALDATE$, $MMDDYYYY$, $MSGGMTDATE$, and
> $MSGLOCALDATE$) but they all either generate the current
> date/time, or the date/time in the "From ..." line, with slight
> variations depending on GMT/localtime.
> 
> Since I pop my mail, and thus receive several mails at a time,
> having many of them indexed with largely identical dates,
> differing at most a few seconds, is not desirable. Especially
> since on Mondays, I pop all weekend's worth of mail and thus can
> get over a hundred mails with almost identical date/time.

So which field do you want used?  Just change DATEFIELDS to reflect
what you want.

For example, I run a private archive that fetches mail via POP with
fetchmail from my ISP.  Since the fetch only occurs once an hour (or
more if my system is off), I want to use the date my ISPs mail server
received the mail, not when I downloaded them.  Hence, I have the
following DATEFIELDS resource value:

  received[2]:received[1]:received:delivery-date:date

(Note: Using indexed fields is only supported in MHonArc v2.5.12 or
 later).

The value says to use the 3rd Received field first (which should be
the one the ISP mail server generates).  The 1st and 2nd Received
fields are generated from fetchmail and my local sendmail process.

--ewh

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