[HeathKit] E-mail Dates and FS Responses

[Steve Harrison]

At 11:43 PM 5/25/99 -0400, Al Waschka wrote:
>>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.

So the answer's obvious: set your computer back a day!

I would have thought everybody understood that unless they actually use
some program that checks and sets their computer's time, that their
computer clock is highly unlikely to be anywhere near as accurate as they
think. I've had to fight this issue with the system administrator at the
salt mine several times; he's of the opinion that just because the server
automatically logs into Microshaft's server to get automatic software
updates and the like including what MS touts as their clock-setting
service, that the server's clock is accurate. What he forgets is that the
server loses about 4 minutes, 25 seconds over a 24-hour period; and it
doesn't log into MS more often than every 24 hours. And often, he,
personally, MANUALLY logs into MS and never does get the server's clock
updated! And I have no idea how accurate MS's own machines are; if they're
anything like MS software, I wouldn't trust them any further than an
hourglass.

Then, the office computers on the network aren't reset to the server's time
until they, too, log into the network. My own desk machine GAINS almost 13
minutes each day! In comparison, my home machine loses about 2.4 seconds,
on average, each day, according to the NIST services. Just the luck of the
draw :o))

I've got a number of e-mails with year stamps of weird things like 1970,
2010, and NO DATE, etc., not to mention the wrong month and day. It's hard
to believe that anyone would pay any attention to the date/time stamp of an
e-mail as anything other than a reference to that particular e-mail. It
sure doesn't mean anything in terms of when the e-mail was generated or
received! If you want to see the date/time spread possible, just go to your
e-mailer and have it organize all the e-mail in a mailbox according to the
date/time.

73, Steve K0XP

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