Raymond.CC Blog

This is another email problem that my uncle has been encountering. He recently bought a new laptop with Windows Vista preloaded in it and whenever he send an email, the time received will be much faster than the current time. He uses Microsoft Outlook to send/receive his POP3 email and Internet Explorer to send/receive email for his Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail. He told me that no that the time on his email is wrong no matter if he send from his POP3 from Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo or even his GMail from Internet Explorer.

I figured since all his email is appearing the wrong time, perhaps he did not set his Windows Date and Time correctly. I asked him to check on that and he assured me that the time on his computer is correct, but when he send emails, the time is few hours ahead!

There are other settings to check if the time or date is still wrong even if the time on the computer is correct.


First of all, you must make sure that the time on the computer is correct. You can check that from Windows Time and Date Properties. There are two ways of accessing Windows Date and Time properties.
1. Double click on the displayed time at the bottom right hand side tray bar.

2. Go to Control Panel and launch Date and Time.

Secondly, the Time Zone on your computer must also be set correctly. Time Zone settings can be located at the “Time Zone” tab when configuring Date and Time.

You might notice another tab called “Internet Time“. It is supposedly used to connect to a time server to keep your computer time correct. I don’t know why this feature doesn’t work on my laptop even if I turn off my firewall. I always get the error message “An error occurred while Windows was synchronizing with time.windows.com. I’ve tried using time.nist.gov, but it still gives me the same error message. If it works for you, just go ahead and use it.

This should fix the time stamp problem when sending and receiving emails using email client and webmails. Looks like webmail nowadays also depend on your system’s current time and also time zone. It is no longer affected by the configured time zone when you register for an account. I’ve tested it by setting a wrong timezone for my Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail account, sent a test email and the time stamp is still correct.