it seems like such a minor problem, but I guess I'm anal for wanting icedove to indicate the real time that email is received rather than some eroneous time. Presently I am getting times from an hour or two off from the real time of email receipt to several hours in the future. I would like to fix this minor problem.

I am using Debian Etch, iceweasel, and icedove

Usually when mail displays an incorrect time it's because the time settings are not correct on your workstation or on the mail server itself..

Do you have Daylight savings time selected ? is that used in your area ?
for mail time 1 hour off that's the first thing I would check.

I have daylight savings selected. If my time of receipt for emails were just an hour off, I would have thought that to be the problem. The problem is however that the time for email receipt is sometimes several hours ahead of the real time, and sometimes a few hours behind the real time. Very odd I think.

not likely that I am the only one to experience this I would think.

is it just the received time stamp that varies ? there should be info in the headers showing when it was sent, received by your server and also delivered to your client..

if you view the message source you should be able to see all the timestamps in the message header.

I would look at several messages that vary different times and directions, view the time zone settings the server is reporting in the header vs. the time stamp your client put on the message and see if you can spot a correlation.

not sure how it happened, I never noticed it before, and I have been gone for a few days, perhaps it happened while I was gone.... my computer had the wrong time configured on it. the clock on my desktop said it was 6 pm when it was actually 11 pm. When I tried to adjust the clock, the window to set the clock time indicated 11 pm, while the time in the tray still indicated 6 pm.

I had to go into the system configuration to re-set the computer's internal clock. I have no idea how it could have gone off like that.

In any case, my issue is resolved. Although now it does make me question what happened that my computer's internal clock would have changed the time. Perhaps I'll never know.