When using KMail to view an email, there is a colored box in the right side of the window, in the top gray colored area of the email, containing sender time information. The time displayed in that box is misleading.

The code for the box display is in tdepim/kmail/headerstyle.cpp and was from a Chakra distro patch, commit d8b40941, 2010-09-07:

http://git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/tdepim/commit/kmail/headerstyle.cpp?id=d8b40941f9d1a221add0b9094eb09405a91a8aab

I believe the purpose of the colored box is to convey the current time of the sender relative to the current time of the recipient's machine. Seems like a reasonable intent.

In a dev mail list discussion, the following problems were noted:

1. The text string "Now" is misleading. The box should be revised from "Now" to "Sender's Current Time." This change will help users understand the purpose of the box.

2. Although that simple fix helps, the time is skewered across Daylight Savings Time (DST) shifts. For example, on Nov. 17, when I viewed an email sent from before the Nov. 4 DST shift, from a sender in a different time zone --- a one-hour time zone difference, the box says the sender's time is two hours ahead, which is incorrect. The time should reflect the same one hour shift to Daylight Standard Time as both the sender and recipient are in areas using DST shifts.

3. The box does not update correctly when the email is left on the screen; the email has to be reloaded in order to
update the "Now" box with the current date/time of the sender.

4. The box has a tendency to truncate text when the date string grows too long.

Darrell