Chris Linfoot | Time Travel with Notes 7.0.2

Thursday, 20. November 2008

Time Travel with Notes 7.0.2

I have an email here from a reader in Australia. In my personal email client (which is Mozilla Thunderbird, not Notes) it currently sits at the top of the in-box with all newer email below it. The in-box is sorted in descending order by date, so that new messages are at the top.

Thunderbird is reading the date stamp on the message as 16:13 UTC on 20th November 2008, which is in the future at the time of writing.

Why?

My first thought was that the sender had set the wrong time zone in his mail client. I looked at the message headers for proof of this and found:

Date: 20-Nov-2008 16:13:15 ZE10

ZE10 is how Notes describes a time zone which, ignoring daylight saving, is 10 hours east of UTC (GMT if you prefer). That time zone would include the eastern states of Australia.

So, the sender's time zone is correct (give or take DST). The problem is that the Date header of the message is not and that Thunderbird is ignoring ZE10 and assuming that the time given is UTC.

According to RFC5322 (which, as you will recall, supersedes RFC2822 and RFC822):

The zone specifies the offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, formerly referred to as "Greenwich Mean Time") that the date and time-of-day represent. The "+" or "-" indicates whether the time-of-day is ahead of (i.e., east of) or behind (i.e., west of) Universal Time. The first two digits indicate the number of hours difference from Universal Time, and the last two digits indicate the number of minutes difference from Universal Time. (Hence, +hhmm means +(hh * 60 + mm) minutes, and -hhmm means -(hh * 60 + mm) minutes). The form "+0000" SHOULD be used to indicate a time zone at Universal Time. Though "-0000" also indicates Universal Time, it is used to indicate that the time was generated on a system that may be in a local time zone other than Universal Time and therefore indicates that the date-time contains no information about the local time zone.

This paragraph is unchanged since RFC2822 anyway, so is not new, and it implies that the date header in the email to me should say:

Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:13:15 +1100

(+1100 and not +1000 because daylight saving is currently in force at the sender's location.)

Looking at MIME format emails I have sent myself recently using Notes, I see that the date header does indeed follow this pattern.

I'm running Notes 8 here and the sender is running Notes 7, but I don't recall seeing this issue when I was using Notes 7...

Category: Notes
Technorati: IBM Lotus Notes+7 Notes+8 RFC5322 RFC2822

Comments :

1. Gregory Engels21/11/2008 09:50:44
Homepage: http://inotes.de

could be an template issue. ieven my old 6.5.3 client/server combination have produced the time string in the RFC format like (copyed from the oldest mail i could get my hands on:
X-Mailer: Lotus Notes Release 6.5.3 September 14, 2004
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 17:41:06 +0200

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