Header of attached email

How the Creation-Date and Modification-Date parameters are populated is implementation dependent. You can read more about this here:

RFC 2183 - Communicating Presentation Information in Internet Messages: The Content-Disposition Header Field (ietf.org)

For instance, an email client might leave those parameters unpopulated, read the file system timestamps of the attachment and populate them accordingly, or populate them with the date/time when the files were attached to the email.

Something to be mindful of, especially with RFC822 attachments, is that the Creation-Date and Modification-Date parameters might be populated to reflect when the attached message was forwarded. I can reproduce this in Outlook by forwarding an older message with the “Forward as Attachment” respond action. I get a message/rfc822 attachment and the Creation-Date and Modification-Date parameters are populated with the date/time when I forwarded the message.

I would recommend testing with the specific email clients that were involved in the conversation if possible.

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