Save a sender's time zone from the message they sent you
How the Add timezone prompt works: what it reads, what it suggests, what it refuses to guess, and how a saved zone changes the rest of Timehint.
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The fastest moment to save a contact's time zone in Gmail is the moment their message is in front of you, because the message is usually where the answer is. Timehint puts a small Add timezone prompt on senders you haven't saved, reads the message for a clue, and offers you a zone to confirm. It never saves one on its own.
The Add timezone prompt
Open a message from an address you haven't saved and the chip on the "to me" line reads Add timezone, followed by two actions: Add and Dismiss.
It's offered for any address that isn't already a contact, which includes automated senders, mailing lists and, inside a conversation, the messages you sent yourself. That's deliberate: Timehint doesn't try to decide which senders are people. Dismiss is there for the rest.
What happens when you click Add
Add opens a dialog with the sender's name and address already filled in, and a Timezone field. If the message held a clue, the zone is preselected and the dialog tells you where it came from, in the sender's own words:
Suggested from "2 pm Indonesia time" in their message. Please confirm.
That line matters more than the suggestion. A zone with no provenance is a guess you can't check; a zone with the sentence it came from is a claim you can accept or reject in a second. Change it if it's wrong, then click Add contact.
The moment you save, three things change. The chip on that message switches to their local time and the time they sent it. The contact appears in your side panel with a live clock. And their band joins Today in your cast, so the next time you look for a meeting slot, they're in it.
The clues Timehint looks for
They're the same clues a careful reader would use, in the message you have open and then in the rest of the thread.
A location line in the signature. "Based in Berlin", "Located in Dubai", "Writing from Tokyo" or "Sent from Singapore" is enough on its own. A passing "Greetings from Paris" isn't: people write that from airports.
A phone number's country code. "+44 20 7946 0000" suggests London. A city in a pipe-separated signature line, such as "Lukas Becker | Berlin | +49 30 1234567", is not enough by itself, but a country code that matches the city makes the strongest signature clue there is. A +1 number is ignored, because that code spans a continent and several time zones.
A time zone the sender wrote. "I'll send the draft by 2 pm Indonesia time" points to Jakarta. This clue is used only when the message points to a single zone that isn't your own, because a zone mentioned in passing can belong to a third person, and a zone quoted back to you is often yours.
One thing is deliberately not used: the email domain. A .de address doesn't mean the sender is in Germany, and a .com address means nothing at all. The technical detail of how clues are weighed is in how a sender's time zone is suggested.
A worked example
A message arrives with the line "I'll send the draft by 2 pm Indonesia time." You click Add, and the dialog shows Jakarta preselected with that sentence quoted underneath.
Accept it, and the arithmetic stops being yours. Jakarta keeps Western Indonesia Time, UTC+7, all year. If you're in London in September, their 2 pm is your 8:00 AM, so the draft they promised "by 2 pm" is already waiting when your day starts. Come back in January and the same 2 pm is 7:00 AM for you, because London changed and Jakarta didn't, and the chip moves with it.
When there's no clue
Plenty of messages have nothing usable in them, and Timehint says so by staying quiet: the Timezone field simply opens on your own computer's zone. Type what you know: a city ("Mumbai"), an abbreviation ("IST"), a full name ("Indian Standard Time") or an IANA identifier ("Asia/Kolkata"), and a hint confirms the match with the current time there before you save. Zones are listed by region and city, such as Asia/Tokyo.
If you don't know where someone is, the honest move is to close the dialog and ask them. A wrong zone is worse than no zone, because everything downstream trusts it.
Dismiss, and turning the prompts off
Dismiss hides the prompt for that sender for 30 days, then offers it once more. That's long enough to clear out newsletters and short enough that a colleague you dismissed by accident comes back.
To stop the prompts entirely, turn off Offer to save a sender's timezone under Gmail in Settings. Saved contacts keep their chips; only the offers on unsaved senders stop.
Dismissing is not the same as blocking. Nothing about the sender is stored beyond the fact that you dismissed them and when, and nothing changes in the message itself. If you dismiss someone and then decide you want them after all, add them from the side panel with Add contact instead of waiting for the prompt to return.
When a saved zone turns out to be wrong
Suggestions are clues, and clues go stale. Signatures outlive moves, people travel, and a phone number can belong to an old office. Two fixes:
- Hover the sender chip on any of their messages and click Change timezone. It updates the contact everywhere, including the side panel and the timeline.
- Or open the contact in the side panel and edit the zone there.
If a contact reads Same timezone as you and you're sure they're elsewhere, they were probably saved while the Timezone field still showed your own zone. The same fix applies. More cases are in troubleshooting.
Make yourself easy to save
The clues above cut both ways. If you write to people in other countries, the same two lines make your own time zone easy for a colleague (or their tools) to get right:
- Name the place. "Based in Lisbon" or "Writing from Toronto" in your signature is unambiguous, survives forwarding, and doesn't age the way "GMT+1" does twice a year.
- Keep the phone number complete, with its country code, on the same lines as the city.
What to avoid is an offset with no place attached. "UTC+2" tells a reader nothing about which clock you follow when your country changes its clocks, and it's wrong for half the year.
Frequently asked questions
No. It suggests, and only when a message gives it something concrete to suggest from. You confirm every zone, and nothing is saved until you click Add contact.
Because they're addresses you haven't saved, and Timehint doesn't try to guess which senders are people. Dismiss hides the offer for that address for 30 days.
It doesn't try. A country domain says where a company registered a name, not where the person reading your message is sitting this week.
In the browser profile you installed Timehint in. If you sign in to the optional free account, it's also backed up there and synced to your other browsers. You can download a copy from Settings at any time. See what Timehint stores.
Yes. The prompt appears on any open message from an address you haven't saved, including forwarded and replied-to messages, and Timehint reads the open message first, then the rest of the conversation, for a clue.
Zones matter, cities don't: a contact saved as Asia/Kolkata shows the correct time whether they're in Mumbai or Bengaluru. Change the zone only when the clock would change.
Next: what the sender chip shows once a contact is saved, or the step-by-step version in the guide.