TimeStamp - Full Header - Seconds Count

Xriva

New Email
Ye That Know,

My local Boy Scout group had a competition in which submissions were emailed to me. The first correct submission was to be the winner.

There were two submissions within 10 seconds of each other !

Question: To what resolution are the times on the email servers set ? Are they literally accurate to the second, or better ?

I ask because most home computers are only accurate to the minute.

Below are some snippets from the email headers:

Notes: These two boys are brothers. Each email came from a separate IP Address so I think each was at a different computer. Both use Yahoo email.
I'd like to decide this on the technical info provided in the email headers.

X-Originating-IP:
[67.195.23.153] Authentication-Results:
mta1063.mail.re4.yahoo.com from=yahoo.com; domainkeys=pass (ok); from=yahoo.com; dkim=pass (ok) Received:
from 127.0.0.1 (HELO n1-vm1.bullet.mail.gq1.yahoo.com) (67.195.23.153) by mta1063.mail.re4.yahoo.com with SMTP; Thu, 06 May 2010 20:10:45 -0700 Received:
from [67.195.9.81] by n1.bullet.mail.gq1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 07 May 2010 03:10:44 -0000 Received:
from [98.137.27.208] by t1.bullet.mail.gq1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 07 May 2010 03:10:44 -0000 Received:
from [127.0.0.1] by omp118.mail.gq1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 07 May 2010 03:10:44 -0000

and

X-Originating-IP:
[67.195.23.152] Authentication-Results:
mta121.mail.ac4.yahoo.com from=yahoo.com; domainkeys=pass (ok); from=yahoo.com; dkim=pass (ok) Received:
from 127.0.0.1 (HELO n1-vm0.bullet.mail.gq1.yahoo.com) (67.195.23.152) by mta121.mail.ac4.yahoo.com with SMTP; Thu, 06 May 2010 20:10:37 -0700 Received:
from [67.195.9.81] by n1.bullet.mail.gq1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 07 May 2010 03:10:33 -0000 Received:
from [98.137.27.222] by t1.bullet.mail.gq1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 07 May 2010 03:10:33 -0000 Received:
from [127.0.0.1] by omp132.mail.gq1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 07 May 2010 03:10:33 -0000
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hello,

Yahoo uses qmail and qmail servers have the ability to log email in a couple different formats. The mail logs at Yahoo might show more detail if they have TAI64N timestamps. For example an email being logged on one of their servers that uses qmail could have associated logs that go to 9 decimal places after regular seconds such as 2010-05-07 09:41:05.404440500. Email headers are not going to be more accurate than regular seconds. For the purposes of determining the winner the email headers should be fine since they were not submitted during the same a second. Definitely use the times recorded by the Yahoo mail servers and not any date header set by the senders computers since the Yahoo mail servers are more likely to have the accurate times and be synced with time servers (NTP). It appears the second set of headers originating from 67.195.23.152 is the winner.

:thanks: for the fun question! -Raymond
 
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