Amy said:
Say if I composed an email on Apr 11 and want it to be delivered on May 11. I
first go set the "delay delivery until" option and then click send to move
the email into the Outbox. When the recipent receive the email on May 11, it
will still show Apr 11 as the sent date/time. Is there a way to make this
consistent with the actual sending time?
Thanks!
The Date header added to your message is never added by the mail server.
It is *DATA* that you entered into your message when you composed it.
When you send e-mail to your outbound SMTP server, your e-mail client
generates an aggregate list of recipients from the To, Cc, and Bcc
*fields* displayed within your e-mail client. Those fields aren't added
later as headers by the mail server. Those are inside the data of your
message. Although users refer to a headers section and a body section
of an e-mail, it is all just one message where the top part is the
header section, a blank line as a delimiter, and then rest is the body
section, and all inside the same message which is your *data*. Your
e-mail client sends a RCPT-TO command for each recipient to your mail
server. It then follows with a DATA command that sends your message,
and that message has the data that you inserted into the *one* message
that you send. The mail server doesn't use any of the data inside your
message to determine where to deliver your message. It uses the
recipients that your e-mail client specified in the RCPT-TO commands,
not anything inside what it got as the message in the DATA command.
The Date line in the headers section of your message got added by your
e-mail client at the time you composed the message. The e-mail client
might hold onto your e-mail but it isn't going to modify your message
when it gets around to sending it via the DATA command. The Date header
in the data of your message will be whatever was the date your e-mail
client inserted into that document when it was generated. However, when
you send your message, mail hosts thereafter will add their own headers
and that includes the Received headers. The Date header then present in
the message, which was YOUR data when you composed it, will never match
the datestamp in the last (topmost) Received header in the message the
at the receipient gets because it is highly unlikely that you could
start composing your message, click Send, have your e-mail establish a
mail session with your SMTP server, transfer your message, your sending
mail host establishes a mail session with the receiving SMTP server, and
that receiving mail host accepts the message and adds its Received
header all within the same second that you started composing your
message.
Depending on what e-mail client is used by the recipient, they can show
both the Sent date and the Received date. The Sent date is based off
the Date header from the line that your e-mail client added at the time
you composed your message. The Received date is the datestamp in the
last (topmost) Received header that was added by the recipient's mail
host. If the recipient is showing the Received column then it is when
the e-mail was delivered to their mailbox. If the recipient is showing
the Sent column then that is when you composed your message.
If you want a bogus Date header line to show up in your outbound e-mails
so recipients don't know that your message was already a month old by
the time they actually got it then do not use a normal e-mail client.
Use a bulk mailing program that will take the content of a data file as
the body section of your message and add the header section to it at the
time they send it to the list of recipients that are in another data
file. Don't be using a personal e-mail client as a bulk mailing
program.
