Clarification for the use of additional fields in the message body

[Frans Klaver]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 8:21 AM, SF Markus Elfring
<elfring at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>>> From: Markus Elfring <elfring at users.sourceforge.net>
>>> Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2015 15:56:57 +0200
>>
>> Why is this in the body of the email?
>
> Does the canonical patch format support to preserve
> specific details about a shown commit by specification
> of fields like "Date" and "From" in the message body?

Using "From:" in the body can be used to provide your properly spelled
name, or the name/e-mail of the actual author, if that happens not to
be the sender. git-send-email will do that automagically for you. If
"From:" is not specified in the message body, the e-mails sender will
be used as author.

The date, as far as I know, is ignored. It is the commit date, not the
authoring date, and once your patch is applied by a maintainer (i.e.
committed), the date gets reset anyway. No need to try and preserve
it.

Frans