[Gllug] Standards for the format of email headers

[Richard Cohen]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Chris Bell wrote:

>    Is there a correct standard layout/order for email headers? My system is
> set to sort emails by date, and consistently mis-interprets the date on
> emails from one or two sources. The only differences that I can see are that
> the order of the various lines, and specifically the order of the details in
> the date line, are different from others on this list.
>
>    For example, one of the mis-interpreted date lines reads:
> >        Date: Tue, Aug 14 2001 10:18:26 +0100
>
>    where one interpreted correctly reads
> >        Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 08:35:11 +0100 (BST)
>
>    I would not be surprised if both are correct, and that my system is
> just failing to read them correctly.

RFC2822 specifies this:

-----
zone            =       (( "+" / "-" ) 4DIGIT) / obs-zone

obs-zone        =       "UT" / "GMT" /          ; Universal Time
                                                ; North American UT
                                                ; offsets
                        "EST" / "EDT" /         ; Eastern:  - 5/ - 4
                        "CST" / "CDT" /         ; Central:  - 6/ - 5
                        "MST" / "MDT" /         ; Mountain: - 7/ - 6
                        "PST" / "PDT" /         ; Pacific:  - 8/ - 7

                        %d65-73 /               ; Military zones - "A"
                        %d75-90 /               ; through "I" and "K"
                        %d97-105 /              ; through "Z", both
                        %d107-122               ; upper and lower case

-----

And lots of other similar stuff.  The full RFC is at
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2822.txt

>From my reading of it, the first example given (without (BST)) is actually
correct according to this RFC, and the second is entirely incorrect - BST is
not a recognised timezone, so it shouldn't be there:

"Other multi-character (usually between 3 and 5) alphabetic time zones have
been used in Internet messages.  Any such time zone whose meaning is not
known SHOULD be considered equivalent to "-0000" unless there is out-of-band
information confirming their meaning.  "

"Though "-0000" also indicates Universal Time, it is used to indicate that
the time was generated on a system that may be in a local time zone other
than Universal Time and therefore indicates that the date-time contains no
information about the local time zone.  "

And lots more similar stuff...

Which mailer are you using?

Cheers
Richard


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