Bug 79898

Summary:	Messages expired based on Date, not actual age
Product:	[Unmaintained] kmail	Reporter:	David P James <davidpjames>
Component:	general	Assignee:	kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED
Severity:	normal	CC:	jonas.vejlin
Priority:	NOR
Version:	1.6.1
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description David P James 2004-04-18 18:39:13 UTC

Version:           1.6.1 (using KDE 3.2.1,  (testing/unstable))
Compiler:          gcc version 3.3.3 (Debian)
OS:          Linux (i686) release 2.4.20-686

As one might expect, this is a problem created by spammers and others who can't configure their outgoing date correctly.

I've got a junk folder where I have KMail set to expire messages marked as read that are older than a week. By and large this works, since most spam is dated within +/- day of the real date. However a large enough proportion come with dates far in the future (2005, 2006 etc) that KMail won't expire even though the messages themselves are older than a week. So my Junk folder (sorted "Date (Order of Arrival) \/") accumulates a bunch of old messages with future dates at the top that I have to remove them manually.

Right now I tack on a pipe through action that rewrites the Date header to the filter that puts spam in the spam folder:
sed s/^Date.*/'echo "Date: `date -R`"'/e

Comment 1 _ 2005-01-13 22:36:23 UTC

I got exactly the same problem.

Comment 2 Gioele Barabucci 2005-04-28 19:13:27 UTC

BTW, it is dangerous to remove a message looking at its "Date" field.

Suppose that you autoexpire thrash after 15 days and that you have a two years old message in your archive and you trash it. As soon as you exit, that message will be expired, even though it as been deleted 2 minutes ago!

Comment 3 Jonas Vejlin 2009-04-04 09:53:16 UTC

Do you still have this problem?

Comment 4 David P James 2009-04-04 16:22:39 UTC

Well I honestly don't know because, like I wrote in the original message, I rewrite the Date headers of all messages identified as spam to get around this issue (this forces the Date header to be a reasonable proxy for the age of the message). I was doing this 5 years ago and I still am. Because of this, it could have been fixed and I wouldn't know about it. The only way I could find out would be to stop rewriting the Date headers and see what happens after a few days once I'd accumulated a corpus of spam with future dates.

Comment 5 mjh-kde-bugs 2009-04-04 17:44:31 UTC

It's still an issue with KDE 3.5.9/Kmail 1.9.9. I haven't installed KDE4 yet to test there.

Comment 6 Laurent Montel 2015-04-12 10:10:56 UTC

Thank you for taking the time to file a bug report.

KMail2 was released in 2011, and the entire code base went through significant changes. We are currently in the process of porting to Qt5 and KF5. It is unlikely that these bugs are still valid in KMail2.

We welcome you to try out KMail 2 with the KDE 4.14 release and give your feedback.