Bug in Interlink Mail & News: Detaching plain text images resets the timestamp

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windows7

Bug in Interlink Mail & News: Detaching plain text images resets the timestamp

Unread post by windows7 » 2020-10-24, 12:28

This bug has existed for as long as I've been using InterLink, and I've sort of just been hoping it would go away. However, I have the latest version (as of right now) and it still exists... so here goes:

There is a bug in Interlink where if you detach inline images, the Received timestamp of the entire email gets reset. Not the "Sent" datetime but the "Received" one.

This only happens on plain text detachments or deletions. if it's a regular attachment, this does not happen.

You must read mail in plain text in order to detach inline images, so this only occurs in plain text mode.

An exmaple is attached: do you notice something that is not right?
It's because I just deleted inline attachments from an email, and the received time is reset.

Is there any chance this bug could be fixed? I would be immensely grateful if it could be. It is the only issue I ever have with this software. People on dial up send me email and the sent/received timestamps are often hours apart. If I delete attachments, the received timestamp becomes the current system time, which makes absolutely no sense as it has NOTHING to do with anything, and I lose all context about the original email. It is often helpful to know when somebody actually connected to the Internet and the received timestamp is helpful here. When that gets overwritten, I lose all of that information.

Anyways, if this could be fixed, I would be very appreciative. If you need me to help with this or help with testing, provide more info, etc. I would be very glad to do so. But hundreds of my emails have already been irreversibly "damaged" because of this and it really ticks me off every time it happens, because it's changing history, and that shouldn't be happening.
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Re: Bug in Interlink Mail & News: Detaching plain text images resets the timestamp

Unread post by Moonchild » 2020-10-24, 12:48

Quick response with some info.
If you're deleting plaintext parts in a message then you are essentially altering the message body; I believe the "received" timestamp is simply the "last modified locally" timestamp -- since e-mail doesn't inherently have a meta field that tells a client when it was actually received locally - so that's where this behaviour comes from in that case.

I'm not sure if this can be easily changed because it would have to be something structural in the message storage format to keep track of separately.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
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windows7

Re: Bug in Interlink Mail & News: Detaching plain text images resets the timestamp

Unread post by windows7 » 2020-10-24, 13:15

Hmm... I guess the idea of "modifying" an email is new to me, then. It seems like undesired behavior to me.

Maybe an option to "Don't modify timestamps when modifying message bodies" would be helpful? If that's not possible, I understand. However, I think it would be an extremely valuable feature/addition that perhaps other clients may not have.

The concept of modification is meaningless to me, because so many emails contain useless junk that needs to be removed that I end up doing this on a LOT of emails. Thus, the "Received" timestamp is rendered useless on a majority of my emails. I want to know when the server received the email, not when I happened to open it and delete the garbage that people put in it. Hope that makes sense...

Also... I've noticed that [cid:wtghowirhgoirhwg] type attachments can't seem to be deleted. I get a lot of these in one account. I usually just bite my lip and suck it up, but one time I got a 10 MB message like this and it was unbelievably egregious. I ended up forwarding the message in plain text to myself and then deleting the original. Obviously, this is not ideal. Can image deletion/detachment for cid: type image attachments be added? That would also be super useful! I probably have 100s of MBs of useless images I would delete in an instant if this were possible.

I appreciate the help.

windows7

Re: Bug in Interlink Mail & News: Detaching plain text images resets the timestamp

Unread post by windows7 » 2020-10-25, 10:37

OK, here is another bug that has happened 4 or 5 times to me so far, and this is also frustrating as heck:

Very rarely, when I detach a plain text inline image, the email disappears. I'm not joking. Suddenly, it's not in my inbox. It's not in the trash. I literally can't find it. This has happened a few times so far and it happened just now with an important email. It's gone!

... or so it would seem. If open Interlink on a different computer, then the disappeared message shows up. But even then, it doesn't re-show up on the other one.

I suspect repairing the folder and redownloading all mail would work. Clearly, it's right on the server and something's screwed up locally. However, this doesn't seem like an ideal fix.

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Re: Bug in Interlink Mail & News: Detaching plain text images resets the timestamp

Unread post by Moonchild » 2020-10-25, 12:24

windows7 wrote:
2020-10-24, 13:15
I want to know when the server received the email, not when I happened to open it and delete the garbage that people put in it. Hope that makes sense...
You're not seeing that right now either. What you're seeing is when your client (Interlink) received the mail, not the server.
windows7 wrote:
2020-10-24, 13:15
The concept of modification is meaningless to me
Maybe you don't understand the concept of modification, but if you delete parts of a multipart message, you ARE modifying the message and it has to be written back to your message store after your deletion of "garbage", at which point the date and time of the message becomes the date and time of your action that caused the rewrite. Note that actual file attachments won't cause this because you're not changing the body of the e-mail in that case; only if the content you're deleting is part of the message body.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

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Re: Bug in Interlink Mail & News: Detaching plain text images resets the timestamp

Unread post by New Tobin Paradigm » 2020-10-25, 13:52

RESOLVED INVALID

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