Thanks John, but I'm very familiar with the "view" and "sort" functionality of OE and use it a lot.

Just to compound things: my most recent connection to the ISP about two hours ago produced five messages, two (incorrectly) dated 10 May 2004 and three dated correctly with today's date, 25 October. So if I sort by date, the two incorrect ones end up at the bottom and the three correct ones at the top. I'm becoming more certain that it's an ISP problem.