Re: Date timer in Gnus article buffers

[lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de>]

Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com> writes:

> Does the Date: field in the article buffer really need to show the time
> elapsed down to the number of seconds?
> [...]
> I'd suggest suppressing the number of seconds---at the very least if
> more than one minute has elapsed.

Is it so distracting to see the seconds? The problem I'm seeing with the
Date: header is that it shows the date as set by the sender of the
message. When someone has their date/time set incorrectly, like 5 hours
in the future, and when sorting the summary by date, this screws up the
sorting order.

An alternative is to sort by Received: headers --- mutt does something
like that very nicely. I don't know exactly how mutt does it. A rule
like "if the Date: header has a date that's in the future, use the
Received: header for sorting and in the summary view" would be useful.

Perhaps it's possible to make gnus insert the date from the Received:
header as an additional header and use that for sorting and for
displaying the headers of a message instead (or in addition to) the
Date: header. I'd call such a header X-Gnus-Rdate:.

If you were to use such a X-Gnus-Rdate: header, you could make it so
that it doesn't show the seconds if you don't want to see them :)
Personally, I don't care much about the Date: header because I have no
way of knowing if the date was set correctly, so I'd use the
X-Gnus-Rdate: header instead. I wish I knew gnus well enough to make it
so ...