1048657 - US date format is assumed when converting email to event

Status: NEW

(Calendar :: General, defect)

Description

[Konstantin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140715214327

Steps to reproduce:

Have all locale settings set to non-US. In this case it is Australian.
Receive an email with an event announcement. The one in question contained the line
"When: Mon, 11/08/2014 - 15:00"
Because we are in Australia, the date means "11th of August"

Right-click on the email and select "Convert to" -> "Event"




Actual results:

The calendar window pops up. The start date is guessed from the contents of the email and set to the 8th of November, interpreting the line as US date notation.


Expected results:

Thunderbird/Lightning should have recognised Australian date notation and set the date to  "11th of August"


I'm not sure where Thunderbird usually gets its date format from, but it seems to be aware of the Australian form in other places. In "Preferences" -> "Calendar" -> "General Settings" I can select the "Text date format". The options on offer are "Long: Tue 5 Aug 2014" and "Short: 05/08/14". So clearly Thunderbird/Lightning are aware of the Australian notation here. It should apply the same for guessing dates in emails.

Comment 1

[Merike Sell (:merike)]

Guessed dates depend on patterns that are included in the locale of Thunderbird used. As there isn't a version for Australian English are you using Thunderbird in en-US? In this case using en-GB might work better for you.

Comment 2

[Kevin Cox [@kevincox:matrix.org]]

Attachment: Created event showing the date different in title and time.

Just an example how the date is parsed wrong which is clearly shown becuase the date in the date-picker is different the that in the title and original email.

Comment 3

[Kevin Cox [@kevincox:matrix.org]]

If it helps:

% env | grep 'LC\|LANG'
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en_CA:en
LC_NUMERIC=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=en_GB.UTF-8

Comment 4

[bluefusion64]

I have this exact same issue but with Portuguese locale. Thunderbird assumes the US locale when creating the event. This is pretty annoying because I use the feature of convert an email to an event very often and it is easy to miss that thunderbird got the date wrong which can lead to me to miss the event.

For example the email has the date 09/05/2025 (May 2025), this get's converted by thunderbird to an event with the date 05/09/2025 (September 2025).

Can you please look into this issue and not assume the US locale?

Thunderbird version tested: 115.18.0, Linux Mint 21.3.