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From: George J McNinch <McNinch.1@nd.edu>
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Subject: expiry/time-since problem
Date: 10 Dec 1998 12:09:59 -0500
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I posted a related question a few days ago to gnu.emacs.gnus thinking
that I was just being dumb and had some incorrect settings, but have
investigated a bit more and think I've found the problem.

I'm using pgnus-0.64. I'm getting incorrect behaviour
expiring/expunging mail. Playing with edebug, it turns out that in

nnmail-expired-article-p

the crucial test seems to occur here:

(condition-case ()
 (time-less-p days (time-since time))
(error nil))

Where time seems to be a string like:

"From <sender> <date> <time>"

Watching the results, it seems that time-since is returning tuples the
first coordinate of which are occasionally _large_ negative integers
(Well, ok large in absolute value) for dates that are a few days or
weeks old.

Here are some sample calculations!

(setq foo "From George.J.McNinch.1@nd.edu   Fri Nov 20 09:44:23 1998")
(setq bar "From George   Fri Nov 20 09:44:23 1998")
(setq ack "From George.1  Fri Nov 20 09:44:23 1998")

(time-since foo)
=> (-10543 13110)

(time-since bar)
=> (26 31953)

(time-since ack)
=> (-10543 13349)

This seems to clearly be the culprit for my expiration troubles.

Presumably the problem is in (?) date-to-time, or parse-time-string,
or some parsing function in parse-time.el.

I'll look at them a bit, but I'm sure someone else will have a better
idea of how to fix 'em.

Best,
George McNinch