International standard is to format dates like “2005-12-11 18:13”. However, the popular email client Mozilla Thunderbird uses an obsolete and backwards date format by default.

This article explains how to enable international ISO-8601 dates on Thunderbird. Only time is changed, so you can have both English language user interface and correct dates. I will concentrate on Ubuntu Linux and Debian Linux, but pointers for fixing this on other operating systems are given too.

© 2005 Tero Karvinen www.iki.fi/karvinen

$ export LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8
$ mozilla-thunderbird

To fix this permanently, put the line in your $HOME/.bashrc, $HOME/.profile or create a shell script thunderdates and put the export in that.

Tested with Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 on 2005-12-11.

Locale names differ on different systems. To see installed locales on your computer

$ locale -a
C
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
[..]

The correct locale for displaying ISO-8601 dates using LC_TIME is the one containing en_DK It means English in Denmark, name is probably a joke. Common settings are “LC_TIME=en_DK” and “LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8”.

To see locales in use,

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
[..]
LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8
[..]

Most of the world has already ridden itself of obsoleted units, such as inches and feet. I hope that soon all programs could have sensible defaults, for example units from the SI-system (metric system) and iso-8601. We still have work to do in Finland too, as some people still talk of “calories” (an obsolete and unclearly defined unit for energy) instead of using the SI-unit joule.

MozillaZine 2005: Date display format (How to set display format in Linux, Windows XP and other platforms) http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Change_the_Date_Format

Aoki et al 2005: Debian Reference: 9.7 Localization (l10n) http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch-tune.en.html#s-l10n

World Wide Web Consortium: Date and Time Formats http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

World Wide Web Consortium 2003: Use international date format (ISO) http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/iso-date

Kuhn 2004: A summary of the international standard date and time notation http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

Wikipedia contributors: ISO 8601 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 2003: Numeric representation of Dates and Time http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/datesandtime.html