[HPFGU-OTChatter] Yahoo mail time stamps - how to read

[Random832]

Sharon Hayes wrote:
>  Tonks:
>   If when I look at the inbox it says 11-9-07 and when I open the e-mail
> it says 11-10-07. Why is that? The message came from somone in Europe.
> And what does 7:50:33 +0300, mean in real English for someone in the
> EST time zone? Another message sent from the U.S. says 6:35:55 -0500.
> What does THAT mean in real English for someone in the Eastern Time
> Zone? The person at Yahoo could not give me a straight answer. They
> kept saying that they were not in my time zone, Yahoo is in the PST
> time zone and so this idiot could not help me.
> 
>  Sharon:
> It's a time zone thing.  The time 7:50 +0300 means it's 7.50am
> Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) (ie London time) plus three hours. So
> it's really 10.50am wherever the email is being sent from.

Wrong; this is what I thought for a long time, because it seems to make 
intuitive sense, but it's wrong. the 7:50 _is_ the time where it's being 
sent from, and the +0300 is an identifier of the timezone. it's 7:50 
where it's being sent from, and 4:50 GMT. The +/-NNNN isn't a number to 
be added to the time shown in the timestamp, it's an identifier of the 
timezone that the timestamp is in.

The timestamps you're seeing, incidentally, are in all likelihood not 
coming from Yahoo, because there's no reason they wouldn't all be in 
pacific time in that case.

--Random832