[Mimedefang] Date

[Rich West]

Good point.. SpamAssassin really does the best checking in that regard.

If you choose not to use SpamAssassin, I would recommend simply adding a 
"This Message Is Spam" header or something along those lines rather than 
"eliminating mails" entirely.  This would leave the control to the end 
user to take action upon it rather than have the mail system 
mysteriously drop messages.

Just to play the devil's advocate, an incorrectly set system clock, 
intentionally or otherwise, really is the problem of the sender not the 
recipient IMHO.  So if the email gets altered, dropped, ignored, 
trashed-n-burned, etc., the 'fault' would lie with the sender, not with 
the way the mail system is analyzing & filtering email. (aka: It would 
be the sender's own tough luck.  They have the responsibility to keep 
their clock reasonably correct if they want to send email around the 
internet).

-Rich


Mark Roedel wrote:

>I'd be concerned about doing anything too aggressive based on the date
>header alone, just because I'd be paranoid about penalizing somebody for
>having an incorrectly-set system clock (intentionally or otherwise).
>
>Note, though, that if you're using SpamAssassin, it's already doing a
>handful of sanity checks on the date header (including checking for
>proper formatting, missing or nonsensical timezones, and dates in the
>future).  Any one of the checks by itself wouldn't be enough for a
>message to be tagged as spam, but chances are that those won't be the
>only tests triggered by those messages.
>
>And even if you'd rather not use SpamAssassin, it might be worth
>downloading just to take a look at the check_for_forward_date() and
>_parse_rfc822_date() routines.
>
>But since we're talking about detecting spam anyway, I'd be inclined to
>suggest that SpamAssassin is potentially worth looking into.  :)
>
>>
>>J.P van Oyen wrote:
>>
>>>Is there a good method to check the date of a mail ?
>>>
>>>What I am looking for is to eliminate mails dated in the 
>>>
>>future and in 
>>
>>>the past.
>>>
>>>I am getting mails that stay on top of the mail list so its always 
>>>first until the date has past I found this is 99.999 % spam stuf.
>>>Also it happens a few times a week that I get mail from older dates 
>>>that I want to bounce as the date is to old.
>>>
>>>Question is can mimedefang help me out on this ?
>>>
>>>Any comments or idea's......
>>>
>>>Cheers....
>>>