Outlook - incorrect time when receiving mail

[Insomniac]

Hi,

Apologies if this has been brought up before, I couldn't find this problem in my searching...

I have resolved all sending and receiving issues in Outlook Express thanks to posts on this forum... except one - if I send someone (or myself) an email at say 10:30am, it arrives in their/my inbox almost instantaneously, but Outlook says that it arrived at 7:30am. There seems to be a consistent 3 hour discrepancy.

Any ideas what could be causing Outlook Express to be reporting the receipt time incorrectly? Strange thing is that when I hit reply or forward, the body of the message that contains the original message reports the correct time of 10:30am...

I am very new to Plesk, so bear with me if I've neglected to include essential info...

Thanks!!

 

[jamesyeeoc]

If you are on a dedicated server (not a VPS), have you made sure that the Server's time is correct, as well as the Server's TimeZone setting? SystemBoard BIOS clock, etc? (see the link below for HOWTO)

Checking Linux Timezone:
#ll /etc/localtime
should show you something like this:

lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           27 Jul  8 16:13 localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/PST8PDT
(more info at: [url]http://www.linuxsa.org.au/tips/time.html[/url])

In this case, the server's timezone is symlinked to the PST8PDT, which is Pacific Standard Time
8 hour offset Pacific Daylight Time.  Which is correct for California, USA.

Checking/setting Linux time:

See the following link for a great HOWTO for Linux
[url]http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/usersguide/linux_ugtime.html[/url]

I believe a VPS server has a different way to check/set these.

If you are looking at the email headers from Qmail, here is an excerpt from a mailing list some time ago:

qmail uses UTC for the timezone in headers, as it should. Set the timezone
in your MUA/mail reader, and it should automatically translate timestamps
to local time, if it's intelligent enough.

qmail's behaviour is by design; it's much easier to track a message's progress
through the network if all the timestamps are in a single timezone -- and UTC
is one of the few acceptable choices for a 'universal' timestamp.

Sorry I don't remember when it was or even where it was.
Email clients such as Outlook Express should auto-convert from UTC to your local time (assuming your Windows OS is set for the proper Local TimeZone as well...)

 

[Insomniac]

Thanks for the reply James (it was actually your posts that solved most of my other issues!). I am however on VPS hosting... I'll check all of my Outlook settings though.

 

[jamesyeeoc]

According to a post in the Virtuozzo forum, by 'fenster' a moderator:

[url]http://forums.sw-soft.com/showthread.php?threadid=24278&highlight=reset+AND+time+AND+virtuoso+AND+environment[/url]

You can't change system time inside a VPS, you can only change a timezone.

Then he refers to another thread for further instructions:

[url]http://forum.sw-soft.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24217[/url]

Hope this helps resolve your problem.

 

[Insomniac]

Thanks again James - that info was very helpful in getting my VPS server time to be in sync with my local time (although using the appropriate timezone file for my local time - /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Brisbane - resulted in the server being out of sync by approx 3 hours instead of 17 hours - by trial and error I managed to find an alternative timezone file that fixed the server time difference).
But even now that the server time appears to be in sync for me, it has not solved the issue relating to Outlook Express.
After experimenting a little further, it appears that if I send an email to an external address (someone that does not have an account on my VPS server), the receipt time is accurate for them. But anyone with an account on my VPS hosting still receives mail with incorrect receipt time - 3 hours out.
Similarly, if someone sends an email to one of my external email accounts, I receive it with the right receipt time. If they send the email to my internal VPS hosted account, the receipt time is 3 hours out of sync.

There seems to be some issue somewhere where 3 hours is being lost (or is it gained?).

Any other ideas?

 

[Insomniac]

OK - after some extensive google-ing, I found that this seems to be a common problem, with a seemingly hard to find solution.

One possible solution I found was this:

Some syslog library calls use the TZ variable to timestamp the messages. qmail's env invocation strips out the whole environment, which causes the timestamp to be incorrect. When this happens, use env - PATH="/var/qmail/bin:$PATH" TZ=CST6CDT qmail-start ./Mailbox splogger qmail to start qmail.

...

It would appear that Plesk is starting qmail incorrectly causing the timezone to be ignored..... Plesk needs to fix this.

(Taken from http://forum.plesk.com/showthread.php?threadid=9499 )

Can someone translate this "solution" into understandable English please?

 

[Insomniac]

I also found this if it helps anyone attempting to diagnose/solve this problem:

qmail will only add a Date field to locally-injected (not SMTP) messages
that don't already have a Date field. If you don't like the Date header
qmail adds, either configure your mail user agent (MUA) to add them, or
use the "datemail" command to inject messages instead of qmail-inject.
Some people even replace /var/qmail/bin/sendmail with a symbolic link to
datemail.

After even more testing, I have found that ALL incoming messages to my VPS server have the incorrect receipt time on them - ALL incoming messages to other servers are fine regardless of whether they were sent by my VPS server or not.