Claws and e-mail dates
 

Greetings,

I just recently purchased the N800, upgraded it to OS2008, and installed Claws e-mail with IMAP protocol. Mostly, it is working fine; folders are sync'ing, I can send and read e-mail, etc. However, I'm having a bizarre problem with the dates on many of the e-mails that are downloaded from my e-mail server. There seems to be two formats. The "good" e-mails have a date format yy/mm/dd; these e-mails are in the latter part of each folder and are properly sorted from oldest to newest. The "bad" e-mails have a date format dd-xxx-yyyy, e.g. 10-Jan-2008. These e-mails appear in the front half of each folder and in completely random order (they are not sorted by date or author or subject or anything :( ). I have yet to see any pattern as to why some e-mails are "good" and some are "bad". It's not related to author, intranet vs Internet mail, age of e-mail. On the server, I don't have this issue. On the N800, I can open and read either type without a problem except of course that it takes me forever to locate a new e-mail if it came across as "bad" and is buried somewhere in the folder.

Has anyone had any similar experience that might shed some light as to why this is happening and what needs to be done? Appreciate any thoughts on the subject.

Thanks,

Alassiel

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

Those messages that are not sorted correctly do not have an RFC-compliant date format, they break the standards.

See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1123.txt and http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc822.txt

My guess would be that they are created by some badly written and broken webmail?

You can use Claws Mail's Actions feature and a script to fix these mails. See the Claws Mail FAQ Actions page at http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/Actions, the last entry in the table, 'Fix missing date', is what you need.

regards

Paul

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

BTW, you can use '/View/Go to/Next new message' and '/View/Go to/Previous new message', also see 'Set default selection when entering folder' options on the Display/Summaries page of the Preferences -- then maybe you would not take forever to find these messages.

HTH

Paul

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

Thanks, Claws (Paul) for your interesting ideas. We're a Lotus Notes shop and I will definitely follow-up with our Notes admin to see if he's aware of any inconsistencies on e-mail date formats stored behind the scenes. As I mentioned earlier, from a user perspective, the date formats all look the same on my Notes mail. That was one of the first things that I checked.

In the meantime, I will also take a look at the fix utility and try running it.

Appreciate the tip regarding view next unread.

Regards,
Alassiel

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

I read about Actions in the FAQ and in the user manual then downloaded the fix missing date script, claws-mail-fix_date.tar.gz, onto my N800. I'm not sure what to do next. How do I get the fix_date.sh script out of the file that I downloaded? I tried opening the downloaded file thinking that maybe it was self-extracting but I don't appear to have any applications that will open it. Also, ultimately where on my N800 will the fix_date.sh need to live?

Regarding the content of the date field, I took a close look at the header date as it appears on e-mails that I open using claws. There certainly is a difference between the date format on "good" emails vs "bad" emails; the "good" emails have dates that conform to the standard whereas the "bad" emails do not. The format difference is not visible, i.e., all dates look properly formatted when viewing my email using the Notes client either on our LAN or using iNotes (web access). I have shared this with our Notes admin who will do some digging on the IBM Lotus Notes knowledgebase to see if there are any relevant documents on IMAP and date formats.

Any help on the next steps for the fix_date script, would be appreciated :). I'm trying to get this squared away before I take the N800 on its first trip.

Thanks.

Alassiel

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

I'll presume that you have xterm installed and know something about using the command line...

'cd' to the directory where you downloaded the tarball and do this:

tar -xvvzf claws-mail_fix-date.tar.gz

This will extract it to the current directory.

In the tarball you will find

claws-mail_fix-date/
claws-mail_fix-date/README
claws-mail_fix-date/fix_date.sh

Then move (mv) fix_date.sh to wherever you want to store it.

Then configure the Action in Claws Mail, as specified on the FAQ page, but use the full path to the script in the Command Line:
e.g.

/home/user/fix_date.sh

HTH

ask for more info if you need it!

best regards

Paul

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

Yep, I do have xterm installed and I do know about entering unix commands at a unix prompt. So, I recognized and understood the suggested commands.

OK, you did say that I could ask for more info :)....and I need to because at the moment I'm stuck. Consider these N800 Newbie questions. Here we go:

How do I transfer the downloaded tar file from my folder under File Manager to my home dir, namely /home/user?

On the N800, I don't understand the relationship between the GUI apps and the underlying linux structure. How do the File Manager folders map to the linux directories?

Thanks for your patience.

Regards,
Alassiel

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

Well, I can't tell where you downloaded them to, but something like this, (in xterm):

cp /full/path/to/claws-mail_fix-date.tar.gz /home/user/

Of course, you can move (mv) instead of copy (cp).

Hmm, hard to say, since I boot my n800 off one of the SD cards, and I can't remember what the default behaviour was. Probably the file manager is either opening /home/user/ or /media/mmc1/

(IMO, it is not very clever that the default file manager attempts to hide the directory structure, but that's another matter.)

regards

Paul

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

Paul,

I appreciate all of your feedback. Here's what I can add.

Thanks, Paul. I'm very familiar with both cp and mv:). My problem right now is that I don't have anything to copy....I can't find the tar file:(. I see it in File Manager under a claws-mail folder that I created. But I continue to search in linux and I haven't found it yet. <sigh> See more below.


I have been poking around relying on ls and piping the output to grep. Found claws-related files (I'm betting executables based on location) under /usr/bin but that's it. The tar file is not under /home (and sub dirs) nor /media/mmc1 nor /media/mmc2. But wait...BINGO! I was just about to submit my reply hoping for some more ideas when it occurred to me to try the find command (even though it doesn't appear to be listed as an available command). It worked. The File Manager files live on the following path /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/. I've got the tar file and now will follow your other steps.

Wholeheartedly agree! This shouldn't have been so painful. Why would someone want to put the structure under a dot (.) directory effectively hiding it? I certainly wasn't expecting that.

Regards,
Alassiel

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

I made good progress in enabling the fix_date shell script but then ran into errors when I attempted to execute it as an Action from within Claws Mail. Basically, I followed Paul's steps on the linux side and then the FAQ on creating actions. I created an action to process a single message (start small ;)) using the %f paramater. Selected an email with a bad date, chose my action via Tools-> Actions. A popup appeared showing output and error messages. Closed the popup. The selected email still has a bad date.

I will attempt to copy and paste the script output in a separate reply created directly on my N800. Quick summary - got a number of messages about libraries that couldn't be pre-loaded and were ignored and a last output message indicating a syntax error on line 13: "(" unexpected.

Any help is appreciated :) If any other info is needed, just let me know.

Alassiel

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

Here is the exact text for the error messages that I mentioned in my previous post.



ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libosso-ic-preload.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
/home/user/fix_date.sh: line 13: syntax error: "(" unexpected

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

sorry for the delay in responding...
Ahh, it's because it's a bash script and n8xx uses the ash shell by default.

You can find a bash package to install, afaik there is a working one for n810/chinook, and change the first line of the script to point to /bin/bash, or wait for one of the Claws Mail team to fix the script.

HTH

Paul

Re: Claws and e-mail dates
 

Catching up again now that I'm back home :)
Thanks for the suggestion, Paul. I'll see if I can find a bash package. Do I have to be concerned with compatability issues if I use the one noted above on my n800 running OS2008?