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So every mail header in the world should represent: Date: Thu, 17 May 2012 08:36:04 -0700 (PDT) as Date: 1337268964 because no one needs to look at mail
by apaprocki 14y ago
So every mail header in the world should represent:
Date: Thu, 17 May 2012 08:36:04 -0700 (PDT)
as
Date: 1337268964
because no one needs to look at mail headers and it should be the job of the user's mail reader to display it in a human readable form? I do not think it is so black and white. In the case of mail headers, the benefit of keeping the timestamps human readable outweighs the programmer cost for parsing them correctly.
- Corun 14y ago"no one needs to look at mail headers and it should be the job of the user's mail reader to display it in a human readable form". Exactly... Who reads email headers? Maybe some server admin who's going through some backups of emails looking for something. He might even appreciate having a date format that's lexicographically ordered for his searching purposes. Having a human readable date is like changing HTTP Content-Length to say "one million four hundred and fifty thousand and sixty four" so that when I'm reading through my raw server logs I can easily see the magnitude of the length of the responses.