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Google announced
a new Gmail feature in the lab called Sender Time Zone. Zoli is happy about it. But in my opinion, it is the dumbest move
on Google’s part and it has the potential to mess up the “privacy” of businesses.
Let us say a business in Salt Lake City uses an outsourced tech support team in
Bangalore. The team in India will use the email address of the company in Salt
Lake City but they will also use their own local SMTP server for sending the mails. This SMTP
server will be set to the local Indian Standard Time. Usually, these outsourced
tech support companies offer services to clients from all over the world spread
out in different timezones. It is not possible for the outsourced companies to
use the Utah timezone for that particular client and this has the potential to create trouble for the company in Salt Lake City.
The clients of the Salt Lake City company, when they activate this feature
from the labs, are going to see the timezone of the tech support guy and they will definitely question the Utah company about it. This is bound to
create troubles for businesses outsourcing tech support to countries like India. If
I wear my political hat, I may feel happy about it but this is really bad for businesses. I do agree that one could easily find the timezone from the header
information. But, not every user knows how to do that. With this feature on, it
is easy for even my grandma to know where the other person is when they sent
the email to her. Well, there are ways to use a proxy and goof up this feature
but this is not helping businesses, especially the smaller ones who rely on such
outsourced support from India, at all. It is time for businesses to wake up to this Google
induced reality.
On the lighter side, Google mentioned in their blog post that it will help you by not waking up your
angry girlfriend.
Let’s say your girlfriend sends you an angry email. It’s mostly about how you
behaved at the party last night and then left for a business trip without saying
goodbye. You read it from the other side of the globe, jet-lagged after a 12
hour flight. You want to call and sort things out, but forget that it’s now
almost 3:00 am her time. After waking her up, things only get
worse.
Well, there may be instances when we will wake up our angry girlfriends but
this feature has the potential to start the anger of an already awake
girlfriend/boyfriend 
.
The outsourced company simply should turn off the time zone info in their outbound emails.
If only things are as simple in life, I will be happy too. As a business owner who is outsourcing to other countries/companies, I would want them to keep all the header information intact so that I can keep an eye on them or use it in the case of a dispute. Sorry dude, I would need a more convincing argument 🙂
I really don’t see the problem. You can specify time zone for each message that is sent. See RFC2822 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt
Espen, it is not about what you can do with the mail server. It is practically impossible to change the time on each mail based on where the client business is located.