Email Scheduling Advisory: Set Your Computer’s Clock to Avoid Daylight Savings Problems

Email marketing professionals in the continental United States should take steps now to prevent a Daylight Savings Time revision from causing problems with any scheduled email marketing campaigns.

As part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress changed the dates on which Daylight Savings Time changes occur. The time change will now occur on the second Sunday of March, which falls on March 11 this year, three weeks earlier than the previous date. Clocks will still "Spring forward" in March, so the time will be an hour earlier (changing at 2 a.m.) after this date.

The primary consideration for email marketers is making adjustments so that email marketing campaign schedules are not affected. Many email marketers with large lists schedule email message send times by time zone, where an email blast might start out sending to people on the East Coast, finishing up in the West, with the majority of emails reaching their destination in-boxes at roughly the same time of day.

Regardless of what you think of the practice of switching times back and forth during the year, if you're using a computer, this little annoyance could have far reaching ramifications if you don't account for it. For many years, the time change has been taken care of automatically by the computer's operating system. In your date/time settings, there is an option to automatically account for Daylight Savings Time. Now with the new time change date, a lot of effort will be expended to make sure the clocks of millions of computers are properly adjusted. If your system is not set to automatically account for Daylight Savings Time, you can make the change easily enough by double clicking the time in the bottom right corner of your system tray. You can then reset the time by one hour prior to going home for the weekend.

Microsoft will be releasing a patch to account for the change automatically if you have the automatic feature enabled on your clock manager. The patch is only available for Windows XP SP2 since older operating systems are no longer supported. If you do not automatically download and install Windows updates, you will want to watch for the release notification, or go to the Windows update site to ensure you get the fix. Windows Vista apparently already made the switch prior to its official release, so the change will automatically take place on March 11 this year on those operating systems. Microsoft's Daylight Savings Time help and support center can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst

How this affects email marketing programs from Arial Software: As long as your operating system time is correct, you should not have to worry about mis-scheduled email campaigns. The scheduling features with both Campaign Enterprise and Email Marketing Director are based on the time of the operating system time on which the specific programs are installed. One note: If you are accessing Campaign Enterprise remotely, when you set up a schedule, it is the system time of the operating system running the software that is used, so you will need to be aware of any discrepancies between that server and your remote location.

Is this Y2K all over again? Well, yes and no. It is alike in that not much will happen if you plan now for the change of the time change. The dissimilarity is that the potential damage will be much less if you fail to account for the change. You might sleep in, miss a meeting, or have an email campaign go out late, but those typically are not company crashers the way Y2K could have been (but wasn't). In other words, you should show diligence but shouldn't panic.

By the way, U.S. time changes back on a different day as well: the first Sunday of November (Nov. 4, 2007). So keep an eye out in the fall for another time change reminder article from Arial Software.

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