Is Your System Time Correct?
The time to change the clocks for Daylight Saving Time (DST) is coming up again. Most of the newer operating system releases have the correct settings to change the clocks on the right day. That is March 11 this year.
However, if you are have not updated your system with the latest update releases, it may not change the time when it is supposed to.
It is surprising to me how many people have not setup DST correctly on their systems. This can have an affect on many things that people do not realize.
- One of them is email. When you send an email, it is stamped with the time that it was created. This time is the time on your computer. Many email servers look at the time that an email was marked as being created, and compare it to the time that they actually receive it.
- While most email servers do not penalize for being off an hour, I have seen a trend of people being quite aggressive in anti-spam configurations. This includes time differences of well under an hour between the creation time and receiving time being considered spam.
- Another big area affected would be point-of-sale systems. Some credit card processors will deny authorizations if the time on your system is off an hour from the time that they have.
If you have installed the latest updates for your system, it should change to DST correctly. Still, it is a good idea to double check that the time is correct when you log in.
Dave.