yeah, I know what you are saying: “So, what else is new?”
I wrote them to tell them their servers were putting the wrong time stamp on emails. Their first response was that it came like that from the originating server.
I wrote back to say I find it pretty impossible that the originating server would put a line saying “received by hotmail at xxxx”, especially since all the emails I received had the wrong time stamp.
Here’s their response:
You gotta love this. Translation: "I haven’t a clue about this but I’ll use your name many times in the hope that you will send positive feedback and I can keep this job which sucks until I can find something better at Kmart.
It seems the people at the Hotmail servers cannot set the time right. I bet their VCRs at home are all blinking at 12:00.
I have a feeling what their thinking is, “I wish this guy would get a fucking life and leave us alone. We have more important things to do than deal with this pissant and his time-stamp issues.”
haha, that reminds me, a couple years ago I signed up for some email outfit and instantly received an automated email time-stamped some hours earlier.
I wrote them saying how was it possible that I received an email thanking me for signing up which was dated a few hours before I did it.
A guy, obviously with a sense of humor, wrote back to say they were clairvoyant and the knew I’d be signing up.
This woman, on the other hand, seems like she is barely capable of expressing herself coherently.
The wrong time stamp messes up the order in which the emails are sorted. I don’t have a problem as I just change the time stamp but you’d think Hotmail would have some interest in correcting this. Or maybe not…
There’s a special somebody out there who I talk to via Hotmail and the delays are killers. Messages soetimes come 30 minutes after delivery.
Of course I have webtv so who am I to judge?
hardygrrl, I am not talking about the delay. I am talking about the time stamp. For example: I send now an email asking a store if they have something and in five minutes I receive a reply (which was, obviously, sent in the last five minutes) time stamped three hours ago. So my email program buries it down there like it is three hours old and it gets lost in the pile and I have to search a bunch of emails until I find the one. Then, I change the time stamp and it will show up in the right place.
Outlook Express sorts the messages by the time stamp, not by when they were received in your computer.
Which makes me think it may not be a bad idea to have your email program add yet another time stamp when it receives the message…
sailor, I’m confused… It sounds like you’re on the east coast and Hotmail’s servers are set to the time on the west coast. Now the logical thing to me would be to use the server’s timestamp so sorting is easier, not the time from the email’s “Date:” header entry. The latter timestamp is from the originating server’s timeszone, and that timezone would be different for each email sent to you.
Are you loading email from multiple servers using the same Outlook client? That would cause a problem especially if the two servers are on different timezones. For something freaky you should look at apexmail.com, they use the server’s timestamp to sort by date, but then they show you the time from the email’s Date header entry.
Spoofe, I am not sure I understand what you mean. Yes, I think we all know email is not instantenous but a time stamp reflects the time when the email was received by the server in question. If you read the entire header you can see several time stamps as the email progresses through the network.
passerby, as you might expect, if each server just kept it’s own time, then the internet would be a big mess as the time stamp would be meaningless. Yeah, 3 am where?
Time stamps have a time hh:mm followd by a UTC offset: +/- hh:mm. That allows any server or program to knwo exactly the time.
For example, I receive an email from China marked Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 22:52:00 +0800 and my program has no difficulty in knowing it was sent at 14:00 UTC or 10:00 ET, which is where I am.
That is why I can get emails from anywhere in the world and they will be sorted correctly and the time displayed correctly. Unless the offset is missing which is the case with some of the timestamps I get from hotmail. If the offset is missing, then the timestamp is meaningless. 07:00 where?
Take some of your emails received from different parts of the world and study the headers and you will see what I mean.
>> Does it really make all that much a difference when the time stamp is?
Well, to me it makes a diffence because I’ll download a bunch of emails and they all show up at the top of the heap by the time stamp but one wil go get buried way down there and I’ll miss it. To be sure I am not missing anything, every time I download emails, I have to scan down the list a ways and make sure no one was misplaced. No one has died or been seriously injured yet but I have made a fool of myself asking for responses which I had already received.
I guess compared to the standoff in Hainan this is not so important, but if the rest of the world can get their time stamps right, you’d think MSN could too.
If the SDMB had their time stamp on the posts wrong, don’t you think we’d asked why they didn’t set it right? Or would the general answer be “who cares?”
Ahhh sailor, I was just having some fun up there. All of us get whipped up about something, sometime or another.
Just the other day I was sitting here getting pissed that my large candles burn straight down the center without melting any of the outer edge. What a bitch! You can’t light the damn things and edges start curling into the center, making my expensive candle look retarded! I can’t have that out in the open when company’s over, so I have a cabinet filled with bored through the center, half used, candles.
Talk about pissed!
I just hope your time-stamp issue isn’t all consuming and you can sleep at night. My candle issue, while troubling, isn’t keeping me up at nights.
Best of luck! I hope you get your time stamp issue resolved in the near future.
I’ll tell you some other reasons Hotmail sucks ass. I signed on to Hotmail several years ago before it was owned by Microsoft. Back then it was cool. But Microsuck has constantly been adding “features” and “improvements”. Every few months it looks slightly different, and it drives me nuts. It used to be that the only required fields in your address book were a nickname and email address, but now if you create a new entry or edit an old one, you are required to enter a first and last name. Gee, I would love Microcrap to have personal info about my friends and family. I just put a ‘-’ but I am waiting for them to put in some filter to make you enter actual letters, and then I will have to change to “adsfoaiwefsve”. I haven’t encountered the bit where you can’t block spam with a pseudo-Microjunk address but I don’t doubt it. I’ve also heard reports that you can’t block certain other domains, and that you can’t block more than around 200 domains.
The crown jewel, though, is this latest “feature” they added. When you get an attachment, the Hotmail server autoscans it for viruses using McAfee, which is useless. I got an attachment that their scan cleared for viruses, but my Norton AntiVirus found and blocked. What’s worse though is that when you click the download button and then choose save to disk, what you get is not the attachment like you used to but the HTML code for the page. So I think it’s broken and I look up the help files. It says there that you should click on run from current location instead of save to disk. What happens then, although the help file doesn’t explain this, is that the HTML runs some script which downloads the file you want. What the hell? Why would MicroBS make such a simple thing ass-backwards like that? I have suspicions that they are trying to swipe some data about you, but I don’t know for sure. The only reason I didn’t abandon Hotmail long ago is inertia, but the force of MicroRubbish’s stupidity is nearing that critical point.
The MS Passport licence which covers Hotmail (which you click I agree to when you sign up) basically gives MS the right to redistribute/sell etc anything that passes through their servers . . .
I haven’t heard of any cases where this has happened but They could if They wanted too . . . .
