Mountain View (CA) - Unlike most webmail services and desktop email programs, Gmail shows you the time when a message was sent, based on your local time zone, making it difficult to determine if a sender is asleep or at work when a message reaches you. A new experimental Labs feature in Gmail finally reveals the sender's time zone info hidden in message headers, including the sender's current local time and handy icons that depict his or her availability.

The Gmail web interface displays only the date when a message was sent, despite of the fact that message headers in email communications always include the time sent and often include the time zone information as well. There was always teh capability to show the time when a message was sent by clicking on the Show Details link found at the top of the message view. However, the time shown is your local time, not the sender's local time when the message was sent.

If you are like me, meaning you maintain correspondence with contacts around the globe, you either have to remember teh differences between time zones and calculate the senders' local times in your head or you rely on an online service like Time and Date to do the math for you. Needles to say, both solutions are inconvenient and often a waste of your time. A new experimental Labs feature in Gmail, dubbed Sender Time Zone, finally solves this problem. As usual, Google illustrates the new feature with a hypothetical situation.

"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," the company wrote in a blog post.

Enabled through the Labs section of the Gmail web interface (click Settings, then Labs), this feature reveals the sender-time field in the message header (if the time zone isn't included for a given message, this feature won't display anything.) Provided info includes the sender's local time zone offset and local time when a message was sent, as well as handy current time indicator in the sender's time zone that updates in real-time.

The latter can help you determine the best time to email your contact, further illustrated by icons shown next to the sender's name: Green phone icon suggests your contact may be awake and available, meaning it's between 9:00 am and 6:00 pm in the sender's local time zone, while red phone icon tells you that a contact my be asleep or out of the office.

ASLEEP OR AWAKE?
The new Senders Time Zone feature in Gmail shows you when a message was sent in the sender's time zone as well as what time it is for them now. Red and green phone icons indicate that the sender may be asleep/out of the office (between 9:00 am and 6:00 pm in the sender's local time zone) or available.