E-mail Dates and FS Responses

[Al Waschka]

Finally got confirmation tonight of something I have long suspected.
You can't count on the date and time in your e-mails to tell you who
responded to a FS posting first.  The message entitled "What about this"
was date-time stamped 5/26/99 at 1:38.  My first reaction was, OK its
UTC.  Then I noticed that one response was time stamped (no date,
indicating today, 5/25) at 22:04.  So how is it that the response was
generated 3 hours and 34 minutes before the original message? I'll tell
you.  The originator had his e-mail computer set for UTC, probably by
offsetting the time rather than using the time zone function.  The
responder did not.

I have been on my computer for hours at a time working on a project like
my web page.  Sometimes Netscape automatically lets me know I have
messages if I have the ISP link up.  Sometimes I'd check it periodically
and get one or two messages at a time.  If I saw something FS I was
interested in, I'd respond immediately.  Several days later I'd get a
response back saying "Sorry it is sold".  After about three of these
misses in a week I finally asked someone how I missed it and was told
that e-mail keeps track of those things automatically.  I suspected that
the date and time was the date and time in the originator's system, and
not the time it is logged into the recipient's ISP.  This confirms it.

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