Forty lashes with a wet URL for me. Or I'll take crow with a side of crow.
I did get a call this afternoon from Nadim, a supervisor with Superpages. He said he was calling to update me and that he'd tested my mail and found no problem. I quickly accused him of being on a Windows machine, but he said no, that he was using Mac Mail 3.2, and, for the record, what version was I using? Wow, I'm really out of date, Mac Mail 2.1.3, I said.
So I quickly searched for an update (which I'd done earlier in the day) and alas nothing more recent. How could that be? Turns out he was on a machine running Leopard, the new, as of last October, Mac OS (operating system, Em, Jude, and friends). Well, I'm not on Leopard (I'm on Tiger), I said, and not planning to be on Leopard. (Holy Cats, I thought). Both of us were troubled that even if he could clear the problem with Leopard, why was it still happening when messages originated on their server? All in all, it was a rather unsatisfactory call, we agreed, and Nadim said there'd be another update tomorrow. (He also said he'd heard about my blog posts - ah, bloggers, we are powerful after all.)
I felt bad when we hung up. What if it was an email version issue after all and I'd caused all this fuss for nothing? I decided to search yet again, something I've done before, only this time I chose the very canny terms "mac mail timestamp problem."
First hit's a charm. According to Philip-Elmer DeWitt, there's a known bug in Mac Mail that creates my very problem!
Mail is plagued with a bug that users have been complaining about, to no avail, since the release of Tiger: when it receives mail on a POP account, it stamps it as incoming in Greenwich Mean Time, no matter what time zone you've set your clock.
Here's the workaround:
In Mail, go to the View pulldown menu, select Columns, click Date Sent and unclick Date Received. For reasons unexplained, it now does the right thing, more or less.
How many years has it been since Tiger was released? Geeze, guys, it's not as if Mail is an obscure app that nobody uses.
Good point, Philip. Thanks for the tip because I followed the instructions and alas it cleared the problem.
Thus, my apologies to Verizon and Idearc.
Now how to feed this info back so the next poor person who experiences this can be spared my pain? Apparently this known bug is a Great Big Secret. The Apple Support people I spoke with any number of times didn't know this nor did Derrick, the great guy at the Apple Genius Bar last week, who did clean up some other problems for me (thanks). And certainly poor little Idearc and its ex-parent Verizon didn't know. What's the knowledge management solution to spreading this little bit of critical info?
And the quandry remains: why did this happen first when I switched to Verizidearc, affecting all my mail and then, with the recent time change, affecting only mail coming from their servers? Methinks there might still be a bit of a problem there. For now, though, I'm happy. (And feeling a little silly.)
