mhonarc-users

Re: archive by months and years

1999-11-04 14:45:37
On 11/4/99 at 1:02 PM, lnp3(_at_)columbia(_dot_)edu (Louis Proyect) wrote:

As I just a moment ago mentioned to Andrzej, if you want to get
clever about interpreting date headers in your mailbox-assignment
scripts, you're inheriting the responsibility to reject those date
headers which are wildly wrong.  That's a much more complex script;
I'm not sure how it should work.

I am not interested in rejecting anything, only making sure that it
gets spooled to the right directory. I really had no problem doing
this right, since the test "if @msg[$cntr] =~ 'Date: ' will reliably
...

So Joe User turns the clock back a year on his PC, to get around an
expiration date on some software package he wants to use, and forgets to
reset the clock when he's done.  Then he sends your mailing list a
message, timestamped as it leaves his pop client with some goofy date. 
Your script, as written, will dutifully extract the date header, parse
it, and spool to the wrong directory, because you relied on bad data.  

In virtually all cases, it's easier, safer, and more accurate to store
messages based on the time they arrive, not when they say they were
sent.  If you want to write a script to fine-tune this behavior by
moving selected messages off the edges of your archive periods, that's
easy too, and it avoids complex, undesirable side-effects to fairly
predictable conditions.

  -nat


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