[Mailman-Users] OT - Mailman and Back to the Future

[Mark Sapiro]

On 12/3/2012 10:38 AM, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:
> * Max Pyziur <pyz at brama.com>:
>>
>> I noticed that Mailman-users has emails archived from June 2013 and April
>> 2024; is this a bug or a feature?
>> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/
> 
> One could argue that the archiver shouldn't use the "Date: " provided
> by the sender, but another date.
> 
> But the mails were archived correctly, at least according to their
> respective Date: headers.


For a long time (many years), Mailman has had code in the archiver to do
one of three things. It has a settings which default to

ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY = 2
ARCHIVER_ALLOWABLE_SANE_DATE_SKEW = days(15)

which means if the message's Date: header is more than
ARCHIVER_ALLOWABLE_SANE_DATE_SKEW (15 days) different from the received
date, use the received date. Other possible settings are

ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY = 0

meaning always use the message's Date:, and

ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY = 1

meaning always use the received date.

The 'future' messages in the mailman-users archive predate this code.
There used to be more of them, but the others are all prior to December
2012.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan