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iMac clock and timezone set correctly but Thunderbird emails show wrong time of receipt and date & seems to be using UK time instead of NZ! How to fix please?

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Have had no problems using thunderbird emails until recently. Now the date column shows date and time incorrectly even though my iMac is set to correct time and timezone. Emails are coming in and being inserted in different places rather than chronologically like they used to. The headers of the received emails seem to be reading UK time even though the source emails are Australia, US and NZ!! Any help in getting this back to normal would be greatly appreciated. (normal being date and time received). Thanks in advance.

Have had no problems using thunderbird emails until recently. Now the date column shows date and time incorrectly even though my iMac is set to correct time and timezone. Emails are coming in and being inserted in different places rather than chronologically like they used to. The headers of the received emails seem to be reading UK time even though the source emails are Australia, US and NZ!! Any help in getting this back to normal would be greatly appreciated. (normal being date and time received). Thanks in advance.

All Replies (1)

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Does this iMac have a motherboard ( PC term BIOS clock time, Hardware/System time set to UTC or GMT -- aka BST -1)? If so it is highly possible Thunderbird is picking up off the hardware clock NOT the OS Clock.


You can check this second time quickly with a launch of 'Terminal' from your spotlight search bar and then typing 'date' it should show output similar to:

user@iMac ~ $ date

Friday, June 9, 2017 9:34:15 AM

If that is showing an erroneous time (especially if it's UK time) fix as such:

date {month}{day}{hour}{minute}{year}

date 0609HHMM17 where HHMM would be 0934 using my above example if I had to manually reset this time.


If this does not fix it please take the troubleshooting info from within Thunderbird:

File (Or the Hamburger Icon) > Troubleshooting Information > From the resulting page that presents DO NOT CHECK the 'Include account names' (for security/privacy reasons in the event this is actually needed later, someone can guide you through sanitizing unneeded and sensitive data prior to submission). Screenshot what is there natively and share via any paste service of your preference (the platform would prefer one that is ad-free -- as some of us block ad-laden sites including pastebins).