Re: Problems with $DATE$

[tomas.halvarsson@fra.se]

On Wed, 23 Oct 2002 at 7:06pm, earl@earlhood.com wrote:

>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.

Oh, OK, thanks. I should have dug deeper.

>> 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?

Yes. I installed it, but I felt like I was losing control over
how things were handled, so I looked at how some things were done
by mharc and then uninstalled it and set up procmail et.al. by
hand.

>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.

Looks good. I hope one can specify non-existant fields, as in

  received[10]:received[9]:...:received:delivery-date:date

and that the non-existant fields just get ignored, if in some
cases one cannot be sure of the number of jumps, but want to use
the last Received: header, that (for example) qmail generated on
the server serving the mailing list, since that's the date I'd
really prefer to use. That should ensure that the date index has
mails in pretty much the exact same order as they were processed
by the MLM (unless the MLM machine had a heavy workload causing
messages to be processed out of order...).

/Tomas


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off this list, send email to majordomo@mhonarc.org with the
message text UNSUBSCRIBE MHONARC-USERS