Below is the issue. The timestamp in the email and the attached photos is fine. It's the actual send date of the email that is wrong. This date determines where in time the email will appear in our Inbox:
Looking into the raw email data, the cause is rather obvious—the camera is writing the wrong timezone into the email Date header:
There are two viable solutions:
1: Write the correct timezone into the email. In my case, it should read -0400, as I am on Eastern Daylight Time. This would of course need to change to -0500 when Daylight Savings Time ends in November (I already have the camera configured to make the change automatically).
--Pros:
----Technically the right way to do it.
----If you're on vacation/overseas, motion alerts will come in with realtime (adjusted) times.
--Cons:
----Harder to implement.
----Past emails will see a one-hour date offset as they cross the Daylight Savings Time boundary.
----If you look at the emails outside of the timezone local to the camera (i.e. on vacation), the email date will once again not agree with the local datestamps printed inside the email. But at least it will be correct instead of based on China time.
2: Write no timezone, just the time.
--Pros:
----Very easy to implement.
----Email date will always agree with the datestamps inside the email as no timezone compensation will be applied to the date—it will always be considered local.
--Cons:
----Technically in violation of RFC 2822, where the timezone isn't optional. However, in my testing, it works reliably, whereas the spec's specified -0000 timezone for no timezone compensation did not work reliably in all email clients. Thunderbird for instance interprets timezone -0000 (no timezone) as timezone +0000 (GMT), but behaves correctly when the timezone is omitted entirely.
This is a very simple bug. Amcrest, how soon do you think it can be fixed? The current firmware just blindly writes a hardcoded "+0800" timezone. I'm sure your coding team could at least find that text and remove it from the email module, which would bring the second solution to realization.
