Inbound-emailed blog posts are changed/edited, breaks aliases, created/changed tags

When submitting blog entries/nodes via email via Mailhandler, I notice that each of the resulting blog entries:

1) have a different 'created' and 'changed' timestamp (which is undesirable for my server--I want to reflect "last edit" dates only when some human has changed the content.

2) are not getting created with a proper pathauto alias. When pathauto node title is "[user]/[cat]/[title], and the category is specified via a command in the inbound email (when a default category is designated by Mailhandler config), then the resulting url_alias ends up being "[user]/[title]", even though the category does get assigned to the blog entry.

Thes 2 things lead me to believe that at some point in the email-coverted-to-blog-node process, the blog entry gets saved, and then it is edited/changed for the update of the "taxonomy/category" command designation.

If this is the case, I'd prefer that these commands (in this case for the taxonomy) get processed and changed in the node object prior to saving the blog-node for the first time.

However, I'm looking at the mailhandler code, and it's not correlating with the above analysis; I only see one "node_save()" for each process flow. Maybe it's something else that's contributing to this problem?

Hmmmm...

Any ideas as to what is going on...and how I might fix it?

-Matt