[pchelpers] Re: help please



Hi Nigel!

In message 008401c27937$a1f5d500$1301a8c0@Nigel">mid:008401c27937$a1f5d500$1301a8c0@Nigel 
on Monday, October 21, 2002, 2:25:32 PM, you wrote:


Pen>  to know. The clock on my pc has the right time yet the time that
Pen>  shows  on  the  mail when it arrives at the address I sent it to
Pen> says it was sent hours befoe I sent it. How come?

NL> Most email servers use GMT for the time.  Some will correct for local time,
NL> some do not.  Some add a correction after the time so you know what is going
NL> on, eg, your original message was received by my isp with this date line:

NL> Mon, 21 Oct 2002 00:35:25 -0500 (EST)

NL> This means it was sent just after midnight on the 21st, then it says -0500
NL> which means 5 hours behind GMT.  Then it says (EST).  All this translates to
NL> you sending the message at 00:35 your local time, which is 5 hours behind
NL> GMT, which also is Eastern Standard Time so you are somewhere on the right
NL> hand side of USA.  To further cloud the issue, I recieved the message at
NL> 6:36pm on Monday 21 October.  Since I am in New Zealand and we are on
NL> daylight saving, we are 13 hours ahead of GMT so when you sent the message
NL> at 12:35 am, I recieved it at 6:36 pm, one minute later.

I looked at a couple of emails this morning, and noticed that one,
from a friend of mine in England, showed GMT -0400, so apparently her
ISP (AOL) is rewriting the Date: keyword. I think AOL is located on
the east coast of the US. I checked a email from someone that I know
lives in the Central time zone, and that says -0400 also, so
apparently it's something that AOL does.

The GMT offset is usually provided by the writer's client, not the
server. When the recipient gets the message, the recipient's client
uses the GMT offset to calculate when the message was written from the
recipient's viewpoint. That's why a group of email messages will
normally appear in the same order that they were actually written. If
they do not appear in that order, then the message(s) that are out of
order are from someone who either has the clock wrong on the computer,
or, if the difference is a multiple of approximately an hour, the time
zone on that computer is set wrong. Many people skip changing the time
zone when Windows is installed (don't realize the importance of it, I
guess), so it shows up as Pacific time, which throws the calculations
off if their clock is set for a different time zone.


-- 
--Scott.
mailto:Wizard@xxxxxxxx


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