Dear Gabby: Spidermail is six minutes ahead!

Why is Spidermail six minutes ahead of "real" time?

-- Twisted Time

Dear Time Twisted,

Don't get scared now! The world isn't spinning off its axis. Spidermail is just run by daemons. No, not demons, daemons! It's a geeky computer term for processes that run in the background of a program to perform specific actions, such as telling time. The term derives from Greek mythology, where daemons were guardian spirits.

Spidermail (which is actually run by "Squirrelmail") uses a daemon to tell time on its server. Frequently, this particular service fails to run and thus skews the time on Spidermail (kind of a failed guardian spirit, I guess). Your computer network pulls a different program to tell the server the time, which is why you would see a different time on your particular computer, what you call "real" time.

In most cases, once you refresh your folder list or Spidermail refreshes itself, the daemon should kick in and fix itself -- your e-mail time stamps will change too, putting the space time continuum back on track. Whew!

Keep asking questions!!

Gabby