Did anyone else notice that Fenix stamps emails with UTC? Its not a problem for modern clients like Thunderbird, but some old school email applications incorrectly order the email received from N9 because of the time stamp.

Here's an example:
I send out an email @ 11:00 PST (-0800) and it arrives with a time stamp of 18:00 UTC (0000) If the receiving client ignores time zones, it ends up being received in the future.

I guess it would be even worse if I was ahead of UTC. My emails would arrive in the past and get buried under hours of previous emails.

Is there any way to make Fenix stamp emails with local time?

Thanks.

@daq,

Could you post the exact date and time specification of the message (you may want to use some "view source" option or similar).

"18:00 UTC (0000)" doesn't seem to be a valid timestamp.

You should have something like this in the message header:
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:59:49 +0100

In any case, even though RFC2822 says the time *should* be local time, it should also include a time zone specification, which means that any conforming e-mail client should also be able to handle that.

In that sense, if what you say is correct, the e-mail client on the N9 is working correctly, but the receiving client is not, so there's no reason why the N9 client should be patched.

@reinob
You're right - N9 stamps the emails correctly. Full time stamp looks like this:
Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:16:33 +0000

My questions was more about compatibility with older clients that ignore time zones in the time stamps and order incoming email incorrectly.

If N9 stamped with local time it would make it more compatible with older clients (in the same time zone) while still following the SMTP standard.

@daq,

What client are you using anyway? Perhaps it has an option to sort based on receival date, which would at least alleviate the problem. Otherwise you might want to think about replacing it with something more standard (this is independent of SMTP, the relevant standard here is the message format, RFC2822).

Anyway, I don't have an N9 so I cannot help much on that side. You might want to try setting/unsetting the automatic time update and/or changing (temporarily) your timezone/regional settings and see if that has any effect.

The only client I found that's having this issue is Mutt. I can't imagine it being very popular so its certainly not a big deal.

I tried playing with time settings on the N9, but it didn't seem to have any effect.

I actually think mutt is not only modern by any standards, but also popular. If PINE wasn't so good I would probably use mutt.

Moreover, I could bet my left kidney that mutt is able to handle this properly, so the problem may be coming from some bad configuration within mutt or some bad regional/locale settings. Try to check that.

I need some UTC stamp explanation. I sent an email on March 10, 2011 (EST) that should have had a -0500 timestamp because it was sent in eastern standard time. However, when I received a reply to this email after the time change to eastern daylight time, the time stamp came through in a reply as -0400. Can you help me to understand how the timezone offset stamp is generated for use in the body of an email? Is it based on the current timezone rather than the timezone that was in place at the time?