Lua

Get the Email Received Date/Time

See more Email Object Examples

Get's the date/time from the topmost Received header. The date/time of when you received an email may be different than the date/time stored in the Date header field, which if truthful, is the date when the email was sent.

The Received header field will look something like this:

Received: from mail.example.com (mail.example.com [99.255.255.99])
 by inbound-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com with SMTP id 72ma443vs1g0o6vqd8erojkpss35s0dt32h323o1
 for admin@chilkatsoft.com;
 Wed, 25 Jul 2018 08:04:23 +0000 (UTC)

The date/time is the final part delimited by a semicolon. Lua

local chilkat = require("chilkat")

local email = chilkat.Email.new()

local success = email:load_eml("qa_data/eml/p.eml")
if not success then
    print(email.last_error_text)
    return
end

local sb = chilkat.StringBuilder.new()
sb:append(email:get_header_field("Received"))

-- Replace semicolons with CRLF's
local numReplaced = sb:replace(";", "\r\n")

local st = chilkat.StringTable.new()
st:append_from_sb(sb)

if st.count == 0 then
    print("Should have at least one line..")
    return
end

-- The date/time string is the last line in the string table.
sb:set_string(st:string_at(st.count - 1))
sb:trim()

print("Received date/time = " .. sb:get_as_string())