On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 6:34 AM, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > I don't know how mailing lists work. Is a "separate" message sent from > the list to each individual recipient? If so, is there any chance the > stamps on each individual copy of the same message would vary? > (obviously this might fall under "game-changing delay" that you cite > as being rare, but I'm curious if it's a regular thing).
If you look at the full headers, each message has quite a few timestamps on it. There's the Date header, which is set by the sender: the mailing list doesn't change this when it forwards messages, so it should be consistent for everyone. But it can easily be an arbitrary "unreasonable" time if, say, the sender has their clock set wrong, if they send the message while offline (or some other issue delays it from reaching the list server), or if they outright forged it. In addition, there's one Received header for each SMTP server the message passes through, noting the name of the server and the time it received it (according to its own clock). There used to be a precedent that the Received header set by the list server (vps.qoid.us) should be considered the "date stamp" to use, though I vaguely remember there may have been a conflicting judgement later on…
