Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Thunderbird ignores user TZ environment variable

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 14 views
  • Last reply by ajdunevent

more options

On 64 bit Arch Linux, my system's timezone is set to US/Central /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central

I work for a company in the US/Eastern time zone so the "work" user account on my computer has the US/Eastern timezone exported as an environment variable in several places (.bashrc, .profile, .xinitrc, .xprofile) export TZ=":/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern"

In Thunderbird 52 (and earlier) this worked as expected. Starting with Thunderbird 60, the "Date" and "Received" columns are reflecting the system's timezone instead of the user's timezone. The issue persists with a fresh profile.

This is probably related/duplicate of the following question even though the poster's system timezone and TZ variable seem to be in agreement: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1229111

Edited to include colon when TZ is pointed to a zoneinfo file per https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/TZ-Variable.html (does not fix the issue, a fixed solution is below, but it is the correct way to do things)

On 64 bit Arch Linux, my system's timezone is set to US/Central /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central I work for a company in the US/Eastern time zone so the "work" user account on my computer has the US/Eastern timezone exported as an environment variable in several places (.bashrc, .profile, .xinitrc, .xprofile) export TZ=":/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern" In Thunderbird 52 (and earlier) this worked as expected. Starting with Thunderbird 60, the "Date" and "Received" columns are reflecting the system's timezone instead of the user's timezone. The issue persists with a fresh profile. This is probably related/duplicate of the following question even though the poster's system timezone and TZ variable seem to be in agreement: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1229111 Edited to include colon when TZ is pointed to a zoneinfo file per https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/TZ-Variable.html (does not fix the issue, a fixed solution is below, but it is the correct way to do things)

Modified by ajdunevent

Chosen solution

Exporting the TZ variable to .pam_environment but without the "/usr/share/zoneinfo" part does the trick for me.

So, for example, the relevant part of my work user's .pam_environment shows: TZ=:US/Eastern

Edited to include colon when TZ is pointed to a zoneinfo file per https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/TZ-Variable.html

Read this answer in context 👍 0

All Replies (2)

more options

Per version 60 release notes there is a new time adjustment that you may need to address. https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/60.0/releasenotes/

more options

Chosen Solution

Exporting the TZ variable to .pam_environment but without the "/usr/share/zoneinfo" part does the trick for me.

So, for example, the relevant part of my work user's .pam_environment shows: TZ=:US/Eastern

Edited to include colon when TZ is pointed to a zoneinfo file per https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/TZ-Variable.html

Modified by ajdunevent