Text written by Michael Bryan at 08:33 PM 2/12/99 +0000:
>
>I'm getting a wrong timestamp from a couple of different mailers we
>use....but others are correct. The date is correct on my machine, but
>it ends up being 5 hours ahead (GMT I presume). Is there a way to fix
>that, or does it just have to do with the Particular Mailer?
It is correct for email to be timestamped in GMT, regardless of its point
of origin or destination. This makes tracking the email across different
time zones much easier, especially when trying to spot delays.
In general, each MUA should be configured to know what time zone it's in.
Email messages should all be time-stamped according to GMT and should *not*
bear other time-zone-specific information in them. Then the MUAs should
automagically convert the data in the email to local time and present that
to the user transparently.
Alas, this doesn't always work in practice. Many MUAs don't get it right.
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Kai MacTane
System Administrator
Online Partners.com, Inc.
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>From the Jargon File: (v4.0.0, 25 Jul 1996)
can't happen
The traditional program comment for code executed under a condition
that should never be true, for example a file size computed as
negative ... Although "can't happen" events are genuinely infrequent
in production code, programmers wise enough to check for them habitu-
ally are often surprised at how frequently they are triggered during
development and how many headaches checking for them turns out to
head off.
