Message sort order- Change to date sent as in header instead of date received to Zimb

[concept]

I've imported a great deal of messages from the old IMAP server into the new Zimbra server that we are testing. Works fine, except for that messages sorted by date in the Zimbra web interface seem to be all sorted wrong. It seems as though the messages are sorted based on some date other than the date the messages were sent. I think Eudora has this behavior as well, while a lot of other email clients display messages based on the time the message was sent based on the email header. Is that the situation or am I looking at something wrong?

If what I describe is correct, wouldn't it be a good idea to include an option in user options for:

Sort messages by date received
-or-
Sort messages by date sent

What do you guys think?

Thank you.

[KevinH]

How did you import the IMAP mail? We reccomend imapsync. It has a --syncinternaldates flag that will make sure the correct message date is retained.

[concept]

I imported the messages with Thunderbird by using "Copy To >". imapsync is just great, but administrators are going to want to allow people to import their own mail. Easiest way to do that would be to tell them to copy in the messages from the email program that they use everyday. That would work fine, except for the way messages are sorted in the Zimbra web client. Can sort by date sent be made an option please? Is there a better way to do this that I'm missing? Assuming that I've not made any false observations about the sort order, I feel really strongly that this is something that should be configurable by the user for his or her account and set by default by the admin.

This isn't simply an IMAP issue. Messages that are dragged up, copied up, or moved up from "Local Folders" (tested in Thuderbird) have the same behavior. I can drag up a message from my local folders from 2 years ago and it appears that it is a brand new message. Thank you.

Oh, BTW, it is hard to search a forum for the words sort order. I think this may be more of a feature request post. Has someone already requested this feature?

[KevinH]

The Copy To function creates a *copy*. It dates the copy on the day you created it. That's why your losing the date sort. In most deployments mail server migrations are done by mail admins not end-users. I'm pretty sure most end-users don't want to migrate their own mail. Either way what your seeing has nothing to do with Zimbra it's just the way Thunderbird (and many other user-level IMAP clients work). That's why we reccomend imapsync to import your mail.

[concept]

Hate to be a pest guys, but this isn't right. "Move to >" has the same behavior. The moved message appears on top of the Zimbra web client regardless of how old it is. This is a sort order issue in the Zimbra web client. It isn't broken, but it is a behavior that is going to make people unhappy. As I wrote earlier, I think Eudora has the same issue as the Zimbra web client. Eudora isn't very popular and there are reasons for that. SquirrelMail, Thuderbird, Kmail, display messages off of the Zimbra server in the order that the user saw before copying (or moving) the messages to the Zimbra server. The Zimbra web client displays them in a different order than most popular email clients. The Zimbra order is based on the date and time the message showed up on the Zimbra server.

Also as I wrote before the same issue occurs when people copy (or move) messages from local folders. Corporate email users all around the world have been forced to store old mail locally due to quotas enforced by IT policy to keep the company from exceeding the Information Store size limit on MS Exchange and due to server resource limits. Outlook users have been stuck with a 2 GB PST file size limit for a long time and now have multiple pst files on their local machines that they can finally move back up to the server, because there is a Zimbra server instead of the old Exchange server. When they do that, and they should be encouraged to do that, their perception will be that their email is broken because none of their dates are right.
Again, my observations could be wrong, as I am working with a single Zimbra server and have tested in only Thunderbird and Kmail. But, if my observations are correct and the Zimbra web client does indeed display email messages in an order different than what other common email clients display, I think that is a problem and I think there should be an option in the preferences to change that sort order. Thank you again.

[KevinH]

Zimbra has an internal recieved date based on IMAP INTERNALDATE. We use this for sorting. Most mail clients also use this. Thunderbird is in the minority and ignores INTERNALDATE then uses the Date header in a message. This is a bit more expensive since even to sort an inbox you'd need to fetch and parse each message to get the Date header. As for PST files you should be using the PST import tool and not trying to drag messages in via IMAP. This tool was designed to handle the conversion of PST and it's better suited for the job.

I can see a possible enhancement may be to have an import mode or something so when you drag messages in from a client like Thunderbird and no INTERNALDATE is set populate it with the Date header. Via zmlmtinject this can be set by the x-zimbra-received header. The server will then use that header's value as the internal date.

[Richard]

Thanks Kevin. I think your proposal would be a valuable enhancement. Many of our users have lots of email in their Thunderbird "Local Folders" - mostly old email from their pop days. We also still have a number of pop/Eudora users. Allowing them an easy and flexible way to migrate is highly desireable.

In addition, while imapsync is ok if you are performing an all at once migration, it can be a problem if you are doing a phased migration. It can really pound the destination server such that it is essentially unusable for reading email. Allowing a less intense way of moving mail, and one where users can see what is going on, would be valuable.

Richard

[prosenbl]

I too would appreciate a workaround for this issue. I'm migrating from an old POP server that cannot support and IMAPd and I'm using pop2imap from the same guy who wrote imapsync. The utility works great except there is no option to --syncinternaldates since it is using a POP3 server as the source.

[Dux T]

I tried pop2imap to get around the MailEnable IMAP "problems", but this fails on dropping email in the Zimbra box, I could "almost" care less about syncing dates, I just wanna get my users email transfered.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by Dux T

I tried pop2imap to get around the MailEnable IMAP "problems", but this fails on dropping email in the Zimbra box, I could "almost" care less about syncing dates, I just wanna get my users email transfered.

What fails? Do you get an error? Did you look in the logs?