From Date not Displayed Correctly in Thunderbird

Certain emails appear within the Thunderbird client without a valid Date. The Date appears as 1 Jan 1970

This situation occurs when the 'Date' header is missing from the e-mail header.

RFC 2822 dictates that the 'Date' is used to indicate when the message was first constructed ready for delivery. Typically it should be inserted by the e-mail client. In this particular issue the field is not inserted. This problem usually occurs with Spam messages.

If the message header is formed correctly it will look something like the below example:

Return-path:
Received: from support2.rockliffe.com (unverified [127.0.0.1]) by support2.rockliffe.com
(Rockliffe SMTPRA 7.0.3) with ESMTP id for ;
Thu, 19 Jan 2006 16:10:42 -0800
Message-ID: <380-22006152001042415@support2.rockliffe.com>
From: test@support2.rockliffe.com
To: mailbox@support.rockliffe.com
Subject: test
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 16:10:42 -0800
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

test

.

(Notice that the 'Date' header comes directly after the subject line).

When the Date is not displayed correctly it is likely that the 'Date' header is missing like this below example:

Return-path:
Received: from support2.rockliffe.com (unverified [127.0.0.1]) by support2.rockliffe.com
(Rockliffe SMTPRA 7.0.3) with ESMTP id for ;
Thu, 19 Jan 2006 16:10:42 -0800
Message-ID: <380-22006152001042415@support2.rockliffe.com>
From: test@support2.rockliffe.com
To: mailbox@support.rockliffe.com
Subject: test
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

test

.

E-mail clients such as Thunderbird and Eudora rely on the 'Date' header being present. Without this header, clients may not display the date at all or may revert to 1 Jan 1970. Some clients may handle this more graciously by using the NTFS time stamp on the e-mail to populate the date field.

Further information. If a message is received by MailSite and does NOT contain any 'received' headers, MailSite will insert the Received headers (as any mail server should) and also add a 'Date' header. If MailSite receives a message that already contains a 'Received' header (a sign the message has been relayed) then MailSite DOES NOT insert the 'Date' header.