Re: smail and US/Central time zone

[Douglas Bates <bates@stat.wisc.edu>]

>>>>> "DMB" == Douglas Bates <bates@cs.wisc.edu> writes:

  DMB> I'm not sure whether this is a smail problem or a problem with
  DMB> another program but headers from smail 3.2.0.102 are causing my
  DMB> mail to be dropped by some spam filters.
...

  DMB> The last part of that header gives an illegal timezone.  It
  DMB> should be -0600 (CST).  Unfortunately there are some notorious
  DMB> spam sites with similar misconfigurations so mail originating
  DMB> on my computers is dropped by some spam filters.

The problem is not in smail, it is in the timezone information.  A
quick fix is to change from US/Central to Canada/Central.

------- Start of forwarded message -------
To: Douglas Bates <bates@cs.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: Problem with mailer
References: <6rr9vgonaj.fsf@verdi.stat.wisc.edu>
From: buhr@cs.wisc.edu (Kevin Buhr)
Date: 06 Nov 1998 10:44:42 -0600

I noticed this a couple of days ago.  The US/Central (and CST6CDT)
timezone is broken.  If you run "zdump" on it:

	/usr/sbin/zdump /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central

or with the "-v" (to show all discontinuities---i.e., daylight savings
time---in the timezone), you can see that CST has been mislabelled EST
in the original timezone file.  As per usual, the quick fix is to take
advantage of our Canadian heritage.  Canada/Central does *not* suffer
from the same bug, so setting "/etc/timezone" to Canada/Central may
help (though it may have to be set elsewhere, too).

Kevin <buhr@stat.wisc.edu>

------- End of forwarded message -------