Fix Postfix time zone problems

Your mail log entries might jump a few hours every so often if Postfix doesn’t know what time zone you’re in

Read this tip to find out how to correct this.if you look at your mail.log, you may find your postfix/smtpd timestamp is off by a couple of hours, like this:

Oct 3 23:43:58 server postfix/smtpd[10511]:
Oct 3 23:43:58 server postfix/smtpd[10511]:
Oct 3 23:43:59 server postfix/cleanup[10513]:
Oct 3 23:43:59 server postfix/qmgr[10497]:
Oct 3 23:43:59 server amavis[5875]:
Oct 3 23:43:59 server amavis[5875]:
Oct 3 23:43:59 server postfix/smtpd[10511]:
Oct 3 23:43:59 server amavis[5875]:
Oct 3 23:44:01 server amavis[5875]:
Oct 4 03:44:01 server postfix/smtpd[10517]:
Oct 4 03:44:01 server postfix/smtpd[10517]:
Oct 3 23:44:02 server postfix/cleanup[10513]:
Oct 3 23:44:02 server postfix/qmgr[10497]:
Oct 4 03:44:02 server postfix/smtpd[10517]:
Oct 3 23:44:02 server amavis[5875]:
Oct 3 23:44:02 server amavis[5875]:
Oct 4 03:44:02 server postfix/smtp[10515]:
Oct 3 23:44:02 server postfix/pipe[10519]:

The problem is that Postfix doesn’t know what timezone you are in. It’s compounded by the fact that Postfix, for security reasons, doesn’t want to read things outside of it’s directory. However you can fix this by copying the timezone files to a directory in /var/spool/postfix/

cd /var/spool/postfix/
sudo mkdir etc

now, take a look at /etc/localtime:

ls -la /etc/localtime
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 36 6 Aug 20:05 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York

copy /usr/share/zoneinfo/country/state to /var/spool/postfix/etc/

sudo cp -p /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York \ /var/spool/postfix/etc/localtime

postfix check
postfix reload

Now take a look at your mail.log and see if all the times line up.

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