Edit Raw Message on IMAP Server

Is there a way to edit the raw contents of a message with some API in Perl, Python, or ev开发者_运维知识库en Ruby? A quick Google search showed me little. In short: someone sent me a message a long time ago with the wrong timestamp, and it shows up at the top of folder in Thunderbird. This has annoyed me for a while, and I want it to be sent from the proper year (2010), not from the future (2020). To be clear, headers show right date and times. The other's client clearly did this, so it should require minimal effort? Right?

The IMAP rfc - rfc3501 - doesn't seem to establish a way to change the date/time of a message.

What is you email client ? According to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Invalid_date_in_IMAP_messages, outlook uses the date of reception of the message by the mail server while thunderbird uses the date in the email header (set by the first smtp server, iirc).

If you use thunderbird, there is a bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=570355

mutt can do it. Anywhere you can get with it (and certainly IMAP support in mutt is not great, but you can open GMail, Exchange, dovecot, or any other widely used email store with it), you can run edit command on a message (per default bound to e key). The result of editing will be original message marked deleted and new edited message added to the current folder.