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Old 5 Jan 2022, 05:16 AM   #1
hydrostarr
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Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 55
Question Fastmail: "sent" vs "received" timestamps

[This is speculation based upon my limited, initial experience with Fastmail]

Best I can tell, Fastmail.com's website and iOS app shows email timestamps of the _received_ time, not the _sent_ (from original sender) time.

Is there a way to make the website+app instead display _received_ time?

I'm new to Fastmail.com, was a Tuffmail user for 15 years.

More details

This significantly makes the displays of my email labels/folders difficult for me for me in a variety of ways. All my other MUAs (mail user agents; basically client software like Mozilla Thunderbird) have been listing my email timestamps with _sent_ time, for like decades.

Why would Fastmail do something defferent than all the MUAs I'm used to for decades, and then additional not enable this timestamp-presentation as a configurable option (to switch between _received_ and _sent_ times)? If there is a config option, I've not yet seen it, and would love to know about it.

It's particularly tough when Fastmail's spam/mx-filtering systems (of which I have compartively MUCH less configurable control compared to what I've been used to at Tuffmail) are effectively delay email delivery, somtimes more than 12 hours. And when I have a 12+ hour difference in _received_ vs _sent_ timestamps in my email label/folder views (say from Fastmail.com UX vs Thunderbird), it kinda makes my mind explode. Further: I see a whole slew of emails that have the same _received_ timestamp once a batch of previously-spam-blocked msgs are "released" all at once when I make a Fastmail spam config change, causing a separate but similarly-confusing dynamic.

References

I've not yet fully digested these related conversations:
  1. http://www.emaildiscussions.com/show...ong+timestamps
  2. http://www.emaildiscussions.com/show...ved+timestamps

Last edited by hydrostarr : 5 Jan 2022 at 07:19 AM.
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Old 7 Jan 2022, 04:37 AM   #2
n5bb
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Arrow Fastmail displays Date email header

I don’t understand your conflicting statements. You say that you believe that Fastmail shows the received time, then you ask if instead you can display that same thing (received time):
Quote:
Best I can tell, Fastmail.com's website and iOS app shows email timestamps of the _received_ time, not the _sent_ (from original sender) time.

Is there a way to make the website+app instead display _received_ time?
Actually, Fastmail shows the Date header, which is inserted into the email by the sending agent when the message is submitted by the user.

I have my Fastmail account configured to fetch messages from my Outlook and Yahoo accounts. These are configured so that the fetch interval can be as long as 1 hour, so there are variable delays in receiving such messages. I just examined an email which was sent to me from a spammer, and it was delayed by about 22 hours in transit. That might have been because Fastmail will defer (temporarily reject) messages from suspicious sources and see if they retry the connection at a later time (as required by the email standards).

In all of the cases described above, the date/time I see in the Fastmail web display (which may require you to click details, depending on how you have this configured) is the sender time from the Date header.

Use Actions>Show Raw Message to see the full headers of a message. You should be looking at the full headers to see the actual sender-generated Date header. It’s usually one of the first headers inserted, so it’s normally down after all of the Received headers adjacent to the From and Subject headers, but before the message body. The Date header is what Fastmail uses for the user display.

Bill
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Old 8 Jan 2022, 06:49 AM   #3
JeremyNicoll
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I do not see what "n5bb" reports. Here's a screenshot of an email shown in FM's webmail system. Note that the displayed "Date:" header value is 09:37 but the message view shows 13:27 (not just a round number of hours different so not a timezone thing, note that 37 vv 27).


https://www.dropbox.com/s/maje4fxeuj...0post.png?dl=0

The "Date:" header in that email (and those each side of it) contain

X-Mailer: Freecycle (https://my.freecycle.org)
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2022 09:37:44 +0000
List-Archive: <http://groups.freecycle.org/EdinburghUK>

and the topmost headers including the topmost "Received:" header have

Return-Path: <post-26047108-87323268@bounces.freecycle.org>
Received: from compute6.internal (compute6.nyi.internal [10.202.2.46])
(tab) by sloti48n20 (Cyrus 3.5.0-alpha0-4526-gbc24f4957e-fm-20220105.001-gbc24f495) with LMTPA;
(tab) Fri, 07 Jan 2022 08:27:36 -0500
X-Cyrus-Session-Id: sloti48n20-1641562056-1604038-2-1036795562156579092

Last edited by JeremyNicoll : 8 Jan 2022 at 06:55 AM.
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Old 8 Jan 2022, 06:59 AM   #4
JeremyNicoll
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And here's the message concerned in the list of messages - it's the only one shown that's been read:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/drqa8t7ds1...sages.png?dl=0
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Old 8 Jan 2022, 11:52 AM   #5
n5bb
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As I said in my last post, click "Show details" to see the Date header (date/time the email was created). If you set Settings>Preferences>Advanced preferences to "Always show message headers", when reading a message you will see the exact From, To, Subject, Date, and Size headers without needing to click "Show details".

The date/time area you are complaining about does indeed show the date and time the email was received into your Fastmail account.

A few years ago I believe there were complaints to Fastmail about the need to show one or the other (or both) of these date/time stamps (created and received). So they show both of them to you.

The message listing is sorted by time received. There are arguments to be made for sorting by time created or time received, but I believe that most users expect the latest message received to be sorted at the top (if sorting by newest first). This allows messages to be shown in a reasonable manner if the sending email client has an incorrectly configured time zone or clock setting. If you can't put up with this, you can file a Fastmail support request complaint or use an email client which allows you to sort by the Date header.

Bill
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Old 9 Jan 2022, 08:08 AM   #6
JeremyNicoll
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Quote:
Originally Posted by n5bb View Post
As I said in my last post, click "Show details" to see the Date header (date/time the email was created).
Did you not look at the screenshot I provided?

/Surely/ the fact that it contains the link "Hide details" tells you that it IS the result of having clicked on "Show details"?

It shows (as do the actual headers I quoted from the mail) that it was created at 09:37.


Quote:
Originally Posted by n5bb View Post
The date/time area you are complaining about ...
I do not think /I/ was really complaining about anything.

I thought though that it was obvious that the OP was talking about the list-of-messages (albeit having made a careless mistake writing their question) and where the only date/time that appears in that list comes from.

However, just in case you actually were seeing something different from what I see I thought screenshots would help.



Quote:
Originally Posted by n5bb View Post
A few years ago I believe there were complaints to Fastmail about the need to show one or the other (or both) of these date/time stamps (created and received). So they show both of them to you.
They don't show both in the list-of-messages though, nor provide one with a choice of which one will be shown, which - I think - was the OP's point.



Quote:
Originally Posted by n5bb View Post
The message listing is sorted by time received. There are arguments to be made for sorting by time created or time received, but I believe that most users expect the latest message received to be sorted at the top (if sorting by newest first).
/Personally/ I agree with you that /usually/ the received-date/time makes sense for a folder containing general mail.

But I can certainly think of instances when that would be annoying, eg when the messages are a specific subset, eg from daemon processes and one wants to see them in the order in which they were created, or eg messages about financial transactions and one wants to see those in the order in which they occurred.

And, like the OP, I'm pretty sure that previous mail clients I've used gave me that option.

I just looked at the manual for the last client I used (regrettably no longer supported by its author) and it gave me a choice of over 20 columns to display in a message-list, their left-to-right order and widths, and let me choose what the initial sort order was. I could click on any column to change that on a moment to moment basis.

Webmail tends to be much less flexible.
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