Subject: Re: Unparsable Date ???!!!

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 1994 12:49:39 -0700 (PDT)

>From the upcoming FAQ:

I keep getting the message "unparsable date" when I receive messages. What
does it mean and how do I fix it? 

Pine parses the date and time in the UNIX mbox "From " line in order to
determine an "internal date" for each message. One of the components of this
date and time is the offset from Universal Time. 

Certain older mailers write a symbolic timezone name instead of the more
modern numeric offset. The problem with symbolic timezone names is that such
names are ambiguous. Is BST "Bering Standard Time" or "British Summer Time"?
Is KST in Korea or Kuwait? etc. 

The routine mail_parse_date() in pine/imap/c-client/mail.c knows how to parse
some, but not all, of these symbolic timezones. We recommend that you modify
this routine to add support for your own local timezone. Due to the ambiguity
problem, however, it is unlikely that we will add any more symbolic timezones
in the distribution sources. But, hopefully, this will only be a minor
editing consideration for you. 

The correct solution is to undertake the transition from symbolic timezone
names to numeric timezone values. UNIX software is definitely moving in this
direction due to the ambiguity problem, and has been doing so for several
years now. 

[MRC]

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, JE-20
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

On 29 Jul 1994, Law Mow-man wrote:

> Dear Folks,
> 
> I have installed Pine 3.89 in our HP 735/99 running HPUX9.03.
> 
> I found it the warning message " Unparsable date" always bounces on the 
> screen. It interrupt me and I can hardly key in any command. 
> 
> How can I correct it ? It is just killing me.
> 
> Appreciate if you can email me with a solution.
> 
> --
> Morris Law
> Technician / Demonstrator     Address : 224 Waterloo Road, KLN, Hong Kong
> Department of Mathematics     Tel : (852) 3397026   Fax : (852) 3388014
> Hong Kong Baptist College     Email : [email-masked]
> =========================================================================
> 
>

---

From: Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 1994 12:36:32 UT

In article <[email-masked]>,
 posted to newsgroup comp.mail.pine,
 morris@PROBLEM_WITH_INEWS_GATEWAY_FILE (Law Mow-man) wrote:
       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
[ you'd better fix this; it's not a valid address ]

>How can I correct it ? It is just killing me.

Replace the date-parsing macro in bezerk.h with a function that
correctly parses the "From " lines.  The macro author made
rather optimistic assumptions about the lengths of From line
fields.
-- 
    Bruce Lilly, Product Manager,      | 
    Routers, Peripherals & Still Store,| uupsi!monymsys!sonyd1!bruce
    Sony, 3 Paragon Drive, Montvale,   | [email-masked]
    NJ 07645-1735  |  Telephone: +1 201 358 4161  |  FAX: +1 201 358 4274