Quote:
Originally Posted by BritTim
The problem is that times are tested (as I explained above) but Fastmail does not properly document this.
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Yes, but whether they document it or not (somewhere the user is not going to find unless they search for it) is not really the point. That level of detail (and timezones etc) is API detail. Also, we don't know whether the search process looks at the dates within headers (ie in the exact character by character format they are in, possibly malformed) or whether it's looking at validated binary dates extracted from emails and stored in FM's indexes.
The user interface is dumbed-down/vague to the point where whatever interpretation a user puts on something is going to be "normal everyday usage" so "after date" should mean what it would do in ordinary life.
A big part of the problem is that the user interface is set up so that a user can type something generic into a box (and hope that the system will interpret it the way they expect). The only immediately visible hint is that one could type eg "25 Nov" or "last Wednesday". There may be lots of other formats that work, but there's no clue in thatt dialog box what they are.
Rather than just have a single unformatted field where a user can type something, I think the box that opens up when you choose "After" should be two boxes, with both date and time. The date box could offer a dropdown so one could pick a date from a calendar widget, or something like "last Xxxday" .. and - if 00:00:00 is the implied time of day that should be prefilled in the time field. Yes of course this would be more complicated (for FM to code) but it would always be completely clear what value was going to be used.