Is MODIFIEDDATE in _index.xml wonky?

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cjard
Posts: 35
Joined: Wed Jan 04, 2012 5:55 pm

Is MODIFIEDDATE in _index.xml wonky?

Post by cjard »

I've been looking for a way to identify mails older than a certain time (e.g. 6 months) in certain user folders. I've been looking at MessageDate and ModifiedDate and I can't work out a discrepancy I see. I read elsewhere on the forum that ModifiedDate is unix time (seconds since 1970), and I suspect that there's no guarantee that a messagedate and a ModifiedDate will be related, but I'm finding that messages sent last week have a ModifiedDate that works out to be somewhere in 2009 (which is before this employee even started at the company).

If I pick on two messages sent about 5 minutes apart, I can see the MessageDate is indeed 5m20s apart or in seconds, 320s. If I look at the ModifiedDate however, they show 169 seconds (if that is indeed the unit of time) apart, so about half. Another pair of MessageDate were 6500 seconds apart, but the ModifiedDate were only 3750 apart. This is again "about" half.. Then I found a pair of messages where the MessageDates were about 14000 seconds apart, but the ModifiedDate were 54000 seconds apart, bucking the "about half" trend with a "about 4x" instead

So I have to ask; is ModifiedDate unreliable? How come some messages by an employee has a ModifiedDate value relating to a time before an employee started? Is there anything that can change this date that can explain these?

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