Hi Andy & all There I was, trying to select last week's mail messages from the ZMailInCatalog, when I realized that the 'date' index was a simple string. Here's a patch, adding a property 'datetime', which can be used as an index of type DateTime. Anything I'm missing here? In particular, I'm not sure I understand what 'sortableDate' is meant for. It's a string like this:: str('%04d%02d%02d%02d%02d%02d' % (dateTuple[0],dateTuple[1], dateTuple[2],dateTuple[3],dateTuple[4],dateTuple[5])) But it's still a string, and can't be used in comparisons with DateTimes. Why not just use 'datetime', also sortable? Regards, Jean Jordaan [jean@blommie ZMailIn]$ diff -u ./ZMailMessage.py ./ZMailMessage_hacked.py --- ./ZMailMessage.py Tue Mar 6 12:33:03 2001 +++ ./ZMailMessage_hacked.py Fri Nov 9 11:42:32 2001 @@ -61,6 +61,9 @@ self.subject = subject self.date = date self.sortableDate = self._convertToSortableDate(date) + # njj: index the date as a date. + import DateTime + self.datetime = DateTime.DateTime(date) self.to = to self.sender = sender self.replyto = replyto