Using UTC as time zone in outgoing email headers

[Paul Gilmartin]

On 2019-07-24, at 12:31:23, Derek Martin wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 07:06:52AM +0000, Ryan Smith wrote:
>> By default, mutt uses local or computer time zone in outgoing email full header, Date section.
>> 
>> How to force mutt to use UTC as time zone in all outgoing email headers?
> 
> For what it's worth, this is probably mostly pointless.  There's a
> very good chance the remote end will use the user's local time zone to
> display the date regardless of what you do on your end. As long as the
> time that's sent is accurate, the user will see something sensible
> when they view your message, and you largely can't control what that is.
> That said, it can be done...
>  
What's particularly irritating is that in text quoted in replies,
most mailers show that "local time" with no indication of time zone,
making it hard to follow the chronology of a thread.

> Set your TZ environment variable to UTC.  If you don't want all of
> your programs to use UTC, but only Mutt, there are a few ways you
> could accomplish this.
> 
> 1. On the command line, when you start mutt:
> 
>  $ TZ=UTC mutt
>  
Or define an alias.

> 2. Create a shell script that sets the timezone and starts mutt:
> 
>  $ cat Mutt.sh
>  #!/bin/sh
>  export TZ=UTC
>  exec mutt
> 
>  Then use the shell script to start mutt instead of starting it
>  directly.
> 
> 3. Edit the mutt source code to set the TZ environment variable during
>   initialization (but really, don't do that)...
> 
> etc....

-- gil