The Myth of the Received Date – Part 1
There is no such thing as a “received date”. Not in the standards, anyway. Is this a quibbling technicality? An omission?
Nope. And I’ll tell you why. Why? Because the date of a message matters. It matters more than it probably should, with the advent of email forensics, being that the date is inconsistently defined across email clients, and being that it is easily forged. Still, the date of a message is good enough for most purposes, as long as you understand what it means and where it came from.
First, let me tell you that the “Date:” header field in the RFC-2822 header of every message is the “origination date” field. From section 3.6.1 of the specification:
“The origination date specifies the date and time at which the creator of the message indicated that the message was complete and ready to enter the mail delivery system. For instance, this might be the time that a user pushes the “send” or “submit” button in an application program. In any case, it is specifically not intended to convey the time that the message is actually transported, but rather the time at which the human or other creator of the message has put the message into its final form, ready for transport.”
