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Archived Forum PostQuestion:
I'm using Chilkat IMAP to search for messages on an IMAP server and I was wondering if I can assume that all IMAP servers search by US formatted date strings?
I had run into an issue where if my iPhone was set to a Japan locale and date format, that the search strings were getting localized to where the month came out with Japanese characters. I forced the date to be of the "en-US" format and everything worked again. I'm just worried about users with IMAP servers abroad that might be expecting a localized date for IMAP commands?
The answer is found by examining the RFC for the IMAP protocol, which would be RFC 3501 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3501.txt)
In Section 6.4.4. (SEARCH Command), here is a snippet:
SENTBEFORE <date>
Messages whose [RFC-2822] Date: header (disregarding time and
timezone) is earlier than the specified date.
SENTON <date>
Messages whose [RFC-2822] Date: header (disregarding time and
timezone) is within the specified date.
SENTSINCE <date>
Messages whose [RFC-2822] Date: header (disregarding time and
timezone) is within or later than the specified date.
SINCE <date>
Messages whose internal date (disregarding time and timezone)
is within or later than the specified date.
You would then look in the syntax specification (section 9) to see this:
date = date-text / DQUOTE date-text DQUOTE
date-day = 1*2DIGIT
; Day of month
date-day-fixed = (SP DIGIT) / 2DIGIT
; Fixed-format version of date-day
date-month = "Jan" / "Feb" / "Mar" / "Apr" / "May" / "Jun" /
"Jul" / "Aug" / "Sep" / "Oct" / "Nov" / "Dec"
date-text = date-day "-" date-month "-" date-year
date-year = 4DIGIT
date-time = DQUOTE date-day-fixed "-" date-month "-" date-year
SP time SP zone DQUOTE
The date-month specifies us-EN names for months, so I would expect that all IMAP servers should only work with the en-US date format.