[nathan_f77]

2012 days ago is a really bad example. A proper implementation should display something like 'created: 5 years, 6 months ago'.

[self]

Yes, that's exactly what my gnus does. An email I just looked at has

X-Sent: 4 weeks, 19 hours, 13 minutes, 20 seconds ago

(Of course, it being gnus, the time updates while the message is in the article buffer.)