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Thunderbird uses the wrong date format

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  • Last reply by Toad-Hall

mattia.basaglia
mattia.basaglia
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I've read that Thunderbird is supposed to use the system date settings but for me it uses the wrong locale for dates.

As from the attached image, in my system settings the date is dd/mm/yyyy but thunderbird shows it as mm/dd/yyyy.

On the Thunderbird preferences, it only shows en_US as an option.

My environment has these variables:

LC_ADDRESS=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_NAME=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_MONETARY=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_PAPER=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_TELEPHONE=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_MEASUREMENT=gv_IM.UTF-8 LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8

I'm using Thunderbird 78.5.0 on Kubuntu 20.10.

I've read that Thunderbird is supposed to use the system date settings but for me it uses the wrong locale for dates. As from the attached image, in my system settings the date is dd/mm/yyyy but thunderbird shows it as mm/dd/yyyy. On the Thunderbird preferences, it only shows en_US as an option. My environment has these variables: LC_ADDRESS=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_NAME=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_MONETARY=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_PAPER=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_TELEPHONE=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_MEASUREMENT=gv_IM.UTF-8 LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8 I'm using Thunderbird 78.5.0 on Kubuntu 20.10.
Attached screenshots

All Replies (1)

Toad-Hall
Toad-Hall
  • Top 10 Contributor
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I'm using Windows, but I did some searching for info and located the following. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format#Configuring_the_date.2Ftime_system_settings_on_your_computer

There was a bug report many years ago, but I've discovered it has had some recent comments, so is worth a read from comment 12 onwards. Sounds like LC_ALL is overriding LC_TIME. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=379279#c12