Missing Date header — RFC 5322 §3.6 violation; direct-to-MTA injection or bulk mailer stripping headers
missing-date-header
What this tier means
Warning signal — bulk / marketing / mild spam. Contributes to the trash score but is not by itself sufficient.
How Gorganizer detects this
The email arrived without a `Date:` header. RFC 5322 §3.6 requires this header in every message, and every legitimate MTA (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail, Microsoft SMTP, Gmail's own submission path, the major ESPs) adds one automatically even if the submitting client forgets. A message without a Date header means either (1) direct-to-MTA injection from a compromised host or custom spam script that skipped the header, or (2) a bulk mailer deliberately stripping headers to obscure the send time (making timing-based filter rules harder to write). The check reads the RAW `headers['date']` field rather than the synthesized `msg.date` field because Gmail's API populates `msg.date` from the internal delivery timestamp when the real Date header is missing — reading `msg.date` would miss the header absence entirely. Weighted at +2 — not solo-decisive since some test-send tools and niche MTAs produce this shape legitimately, but extremely rare in normal traffic.
False-positive guard
Every signal in Gorganizer feeds a multi-module score — never a sole verdict. This is a warning-tier signal — bulk / marketing / mild spam. It contributes to the trash score but never triggers deletion on its own. Gorganizer requires multiple signals + a margin over the safety floor before any email is moved to trash.
About the scoring engine
Gorganizer's scoring engine emits over 1,800 signals across six modules — headers, sender, subject, body, attachments, and structural metadata. Every email is scored by every module independently; the final verdict requires multiple modules to agree and the trash score to beat the safety floor by a margin.
Sacred safety guards — never delete starred emails, replies, calendar invites, receipts/invoices, or attachments — apply unconditionally regardless of any signal.
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