Re: Yahoo email message from where?

From: Barry Margolin (barry.margolin@level3.com)
Date: 03/28/03 

From: Barry Margolin <barry.margolin@level3.com>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 16:15:11 GMT

In article <f1ce3e3b.0303280213.46fb8f8c@posting.google.com>,
David Beale <shb_factfinder@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I've received an e-mail from a yahoo.com address and the date
>information indicates that this was sent from somewhere with a GMT
>-08.00 (PST) timezone. This would make it Canada.

Why would it have to be Canada? The entire west coast of the US is in that
timezone.

> However it seems
>that the majority of yahoo.com e-mail addesses give this North
>American timezone irrespective of where they are sent from. A friend
>in Londoon sent me one yesterday and it came out the same. What I need
>to be able to find out is what country the original message came from.
>Any help out there?

Yahoo.com can be used by people anywhere in the world, and it doesn't know
where they really are. I presume it has a preference setting that lets you
select the timezone to use for your outgoing mail, but I'll bet many users
don't bother with it. So they get whatever the default is. If the
majority is GMT-8, I suspect that's the default.

Anyway, even if the timezone were accurate, how would you expect that to be
useful in determining the country? A timezone identifies a strip of the
world that reaches from pole to pole, and most of them go through quite a
few countries. 

-- 
Barry Margolin, barry.margolin@level3.com
Genuity Managed Services, Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.

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