3.18.8 Article Date

The date is most likely generated in some obscure timezone you've never heard of, so it's quite nice to be able to find out what the time was when the article was sent.

W T u

Display the date in UT (aka. GMT, aka ZULU) (gnus-article-date-ut).

W T i

Display the date in international format, aka. ISO 8601 (gnus-article-date-iso8601).

W T l

Display the date in the local timezone (gnus-article-date-local).

W T p

Display the date in a format that's easily pronounceable in English (gnus-article-date-english).

W T s

Display the date using a user-defined format (gnus-article-date-user). The format is specified by the gnus-article-time-format variable, and is a string that's passed to format-time-string. See the documentation of that variable for a list of possible format specs.

W T e

Say how much time has elapsed between the article was posted and now (gnus-article-date-lapsed). It looks something like:

          X-Sent: 6 weeks, 4 days, 1 hour, 3 minutes, 8 seconds ago

The value of gnus-article-date-lapsed-new-header determines whether this header will just be added below the old Date one, or will replace it.

An advantage of using Gnus to read mail is that it converts simple bugs into wonderful absurdities.

If you want to have this line updated continually, you can put

          (gnus-start-date-timer)

in your ~/.gnus.el file, or you can run it off of some hook. If you want to stop the timer, you can use the gnus-stop-date-timer command.

W T o

Display the original date (gnus-article-date-original). This can be useful if you normally use some other conversion function and are worried that it might be doing something totally wrong. Say, claiming that the article was posted in 1854. Although something like that is totally impossible. Don't you trust me? *titter*

See Customizing Articles, for how to display the date in your preferred format automatically.