Gmail – Display Exact Received Time Instead of Relative Time

gmail

Does Google offer a configuration option, or has someone developed a plugin or extension, that can display the exact received time instead of the relative time an email was received?

This is what I see today:

Jun 27 (1 day ago)

The problem is, I have to hover or open the original message in order to determine what time of day this message was received. So for example, if someone says "check the email I sent you yesterday at lunchtime", that's currently really hard to do by scanning my inbox. It's also hard to distinguish between emails I receive on the hour (alerts & such).

I would like the received time to look like one of these:

  • Jun 27, 9:03 PM EDT
  • Jun 27, 21:03 EDT

Best Answer

There does not appear to be a configuration option for this, and a look at Google support forum confirms this.

I've made a bookmarklet that changes the display of email list to put the time first. Unfortunately there is not enough room to show both date and time, and messing with the layout of Gmail pages is likely to result in something else breaking (especially if Google tweaks the design). So I squeezed in only the day of month: e.g., 

11:56 AM 27
12:13 PM 27 
12:34 PM 27 
12:46 PM 27

Hopefully this will help locating the message by time.

This could be made into a userscript for your browser that always executes on Gmail pages, although I'm not sure you'd always want this format. The source code is this: 

a = document.getElementsByTagName('tr');
for (i=0; i<a.length; i++) {
  b = a[i].children;
  if (b.length==8) {
    s = b[7].firstElementChild;
    d = s.title.split(/, | at /);
    if (d.length==4) {
      s.textContent = d[3]+' '+d[1].split(' ')[1];
    }
  }
}
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