Which date does an email take?

The times and dates always appear according to the time zones of the person seeing the email.

If I receive an email now from someone in a different time zone, I will see that it was received at 7:08am, and the sender will see that it was sent at this time, their time zone.

Technically you shouldn’t really notice a difference in “travel time” of an email between one that is sent next door and one that is sent to the other side of the world. However some mail servers, especially in otherparts of the world where they might be monitored, do weird things.

….but now that I re-read your question. I guess that wasn’t really part of it. LOL I’m an idiot.

Just about all computer transactions take place along a given time line called Zulu or GMT. The operating system of a computer has localization settings which are applied to normalize a system to a give location. One localization setting is the Time Zone offset. If you go an change your time zone you will see the received time of your e-mails change with it. :) So if you set you time zone to that of your friend you will see them sent and received pretty close together.

gos is right, what you see depends on your own settings (which for my hotmail are set to GMT though)

Thanks all of you!
Does this date depend on the email account settings (the chosen time-zone) or the computer from where I’m loggin in?
Let me clarify my doubt. Suppose, I’ve signed up my email account in India, with Indian time zone. If I go to some other place like US for working a couple of months, and access the email account from there, which timing would be returned? time-zone settings that is configured in email settings or US timing from where I’m accessing the email account?
Thanks again.

Web Browsers will probably use the localization settings of the PC where they are running. So unless you specifically override the setting either on the PC or in the options for the web based mail client you will get local time displayed.

again, it depends. My hotmail shows GMT wherever I am, because I told it to do that. But I expect other ways of viewing email (eg outlook or eudora) might show the time on the computer you’re using. I’m not even sure about other web-based emails. I’m just pretty sure about hotmail.

Thanks again.