Wrong time zone in email alerts

The new Alertengine sends email alerts where the Date header is in UTC instead of local time:

From nav@gullars.uit.no Tue Jun 16 10:05:14 2009 Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:05:40 -0000

Alertengine uses Django to send mail, and Django sets the Date header like this:

from email.Utils import formatdate, parseaddr, formataddr ... if 'date' not in header_names: msg['Date'] = formatdate()

Calling formatdate() without arguments returns a date in UTC. So Django disregards its own time zone setting here. I'm not sure if it's done on purpose, but anyway a workaround in Alertengine would be to set the Date header explicitly to some localtime value, perhaps with:

formatdate(localtime=True)

or even better, use a value based on the time zone in the Django config. (Not sure how to do that.)