various time related problems

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Mon, 9 Jul 2001 13:37:12 -0600
    From:        Nathanael Noblet <nathanael at primality.com>
    Message-ID:  <0107091337120C.08498 at perseus>

  | Is there anyway I can get a list of 3 
  | letter abreviations so to get the JST and convert to an UTC offset?

This is a very common question and desire.  The reason you are having to
hunt to try to find the information is that there simply is no way to do
this - those 3 letter (well, not always, they can be other lengths as well)
abbreviations aren't standardised anywhere, and more importantly aren't
unique (is JST Japanese time, or Jordanian time ??)

The correct thing (though certainly not easy) to do is to get anyone using
a mailer that is sending such a timezone in the Date line of an e-mail
header to get fixed - it us unquestionably broken, JST isn't a legal
string to use as a timezone in a Date header - while there are a few that
are (the US standard ones, plus GMT basically) everyone should really be
using numeric timezone indicators.   Those are easy to parse...

kre