Rewriting a Single Digit "Day" in the Date Header (Doc ID 2564672.1)

Last updated on JANUARY 03, 2023

Applies to:

Goal

As per RFC 5322, "day" is allowed to be one or two digits:

  day = ([FWS] 1*2DIGIT FWS) / obs-day

It just so happens that some mail clients format the day with a single digit for days 1-9 of the month.

For example:

Although, the rewritten date is still perfectly RFC-compliant, just as was the single digit version.

The rewriting of the Date header can cause DKIM failures for certain mails taking a particular path when this header is used in DKIM signatures.  Hence it is necessary to avoid such rewriting where "dkimpreserve" is in use.

Question: Why is Oracle Messaging Server rewriting a perfectly valid Date header?

It is known that capabilities are provided to stop this rewriting, but wonder whether this rewriting should be the default behavior? Email messages that undergo this rewriting on final delivery to the mailbox (if not before) may not cause a problem.  However, such rewriting seem to be somewhat unnecessary.

Whether doing this extra work (rewriting) by default worth it (it sometimes seems to be the only rewriting it is doing)? Is there any way to prevent that particular rewriting of the day in the Date header without disabling fix-up of real non-compliant factors in the header?
 

Solution

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