173242 - mail time is always shown in GMT

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[di.ma]

The time of my mails (incoming time, sent time etc.) is shown only in GMT time
in the mail client! Although my XP is set to GMT+1 (Berlin time, CET). Mozilla
is just showing GMT +0000 and also transmit mail with GMT +0000!

Is it possible to set Mozilla to use local time for mail transmissions?

Is this a Mozilla problem or a problem of my "prefs.js" settings? If it's an
settings problem how do fix it?

My Mozilla version: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-AT; rv:1.1b)
Gecko/20020722

Comment 1

[di.ma]

The same behavior happens on my Win2k computer with the same timezone settings!
So it seems to be replicable!

Comment 2

[parish]

Maybe I can shed some light on this as I have a /similar/ problem that may
actually be caused by the same thing.

I live in England so my normal TZ is GMT, but is currently GMT+1 (DST). Mail and
NG posts I send from Moz are timestamped with the current clock time but with
+0000 instead of +0100. This isn't actually a bug in Mozilla, but in Windows. My
machine dual boots (with FreeBSD) and both OSen are set to *not* automatically
adjust for DST (to stop the clock being adjusted twice). Under FreeBSD Moz
timestamps messages correctly (clock time +0100) but in Windows, Outlook Express
does the same as Moz (+0000).

The bug in Windows is deliberate ("by design" in MS-speak) to allow Windows to
handle timestamps on FAT filesystems (which don't store TZ/DST info) correctly
when comparing with files on NTFS (needless to say this only affects NT-class
Windows).

http://www.codeproject.com/datetime/dstbugs.asp gives a very detailed
explanation of the cause and effect of this "feature". It also references 2 MSKB
articles (one of which is no longer available). Also these 2 KB articles cover it:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q129574
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q190315

In all cases they refer to timestamping on /files/ but since the "broken" code
is in the C runtime libs and not the filesystem drivers it appears that is
affecting everything that uses the C library time functions (this is supported
by the fact that in the cygwin shell ``date +%z'' returns +0000, not +0100

Since this is not actually a Moz bug I guess this will be marked INVALID or
WONTFIX but it would be neat if we could address it since OE gets it wrong as
well :-)

If "Automatically adjust for DST changes" is *un*checked on the timezone tab in
Adjust Date/Time then the value DisableAutoDaylightTimeSet is set to 1 in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation

but if "Automaticallly adjust..." is checked then DisableAutoDaylightTimeSet is
removed (rather than being set to 0; if you set it to 0 in the registry then
Windows will remove the value). It would seem to be easy to handle this by
checking if DisableAutoDaylightTimeSet is set *and* DST is in effect then add 1
to the UTC offset returned by Windows (or subtracting 1 hour from the time).

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Reporter (di.ma) -- are you satisfied with Parish's explanation in comment 2?
If so, please mark this bug as Resolved/Invalid.

Comment 4

[di.ma]

I will live with this behavior - although it would be great to have improvements
against Outlook ;-)!