This article describes how you can customize Thunderbird's date and time formats using regional settings or override preferences.
Choose Thunderbird date and time formats defined by operating system or application localeBy default, Thunderbird will use date and time formats according to the regional settings of your operating system. If you have more than one language pack installed for Thunderbird, and if the regional settings of your operating system are different from your current Thunderbird user interface language, you can also choose the application locale for Date and Time Formatting:
≡ > Preferences > General > Language & Appearance > Date and Time Formatting >
(•) Application locale: German (Germany)
( ) Regional settings locale: English (United States)
Note: You need to restart Thunderbird for any changes to date and time formats to take effect!
This will reflect in the underlying Thunderbird preference:
intl.regional_prefs.use_os_locales = true (default: Use Regional Settings locale of operating system)
intl.regional_prefs.use_os_locales = false (modified: Use current Application locale of Thunderbird)
Thunderbird will then format date and time according to your regional choice, for example:
Whilst such regional formats might be well understood in their original regions, they can be ambiguous in international contexts, for example due to the inversion of day and month in North America, or (if you're used to that) the absence of inversion the rest of the world, or the use of dots as separators. Similarly, the time 12 PM might leave many guessing if that's 12 noon or 12 midnight...
So if you are looking for an easy way to clarify your dates and times without resorting to Swedish regional settings, Thunderbird's date and time format override preferences will come in handy.
Create date and time format override preferences using Thunderbird's Config EditorThunderbird's date and time format override preferences will allow you to apply date and time formats which are different and independent of those defined by the regional localizations available in your operating system or Thunderbird. You need to create these preferences and set them to your preferred format.
This feature is available starting from Thunderbird 91, soon available for download from www.thunderbird.net (until then, try it in Thunderbird 91 beta).
The following string preferences are supported by the platform:
Preference Example value Output Description intl.date_time.pattern_override.date_short yyyy-MM-dd 2025-12-31 Short date intl.date_time.pattern_override.date_medium Medium date intl.date_time.pattern_override.date_long Long date intl.date_time.pattern_override.date_full Full date intl.date_time.pattern_override.time_short HH:mm 09:59 Short time intl.date_time.pattern_override.time_medium Medium time intl.date_time.pattern_override.time_long Long time intl.date_time.pattern_override.time_full Full time Note:yyyy-MM-dd
, as listed in the Date Field Symbol Table.The most useful preferences are intl.date_time.pattern_override.date_short and intl.date_time.pattern_override.time_short. For example, these preferences are used to construct the date/time stamps in message reader, in combination with intl.date_time.pattern_override.connector_short described below.
You can use Thunderbird's inbuilt config editor to create these prefs:
yyyy-MM-dd
(you can always edit the value again later).Then do the same by analogy for intl.date_time.pattern_override.time_short.
Remember to restart Thunderbird for your custom date and time format preferences to take effect!
Change the date/time connector (e.g. from comma to space)You might also want to change that Thunderbird will typically connect date and time with a comma. First you need to create a preference called intl.date_time.pattern_override.connector_short.
The connector preference value must have date and time placeholders in curly brackets.
Some examples:
intl.date_time.pattern_override.connector_short = {1} {0}
(single space between placeholders)
Result for the short date and short time combination (as used in message display): 2021-06-24 21:00
intl.date_time.pattern_override.connector_short = {1}'T'{0}
Result for the short date and short time combination: 2021-06-24T21:00
You need to restart Thunderbird for your new connector to take effect!
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.3