Assuming all of your team is in the same zone, you can do the following:

Add the following line to your config_inc.php:
putenv("TZ=US/Eastern");

The correct value for TZ can be looked up via the following link:
http://www.theprojects.org/dev/zone.txt

Note that the change of the time zone will be effective for new issues, i.e. the existing ones will be based on the time zone of the server but they will be interpreted by Mantis as if they are based on the new timezone.

Ideally, we should be able to support a time zone per user, and then map the server time to the user viewing the issue or receiving the email.

Let me know how you go with this work around.

It works! Our project includes people in differenct time-zones (India & Ireland). Could you pls put more light on the time-zone support per user? Thanks.

I could use this as well. Would love to have this in account_prefs_page.php

I would be really interested in this too...is there any news on this?

Changed the summary and marked this a feature request.

This would go hand in hand with ID 0006241

There is a time zone setting in "My Account" -> "Preferences" since version
1.2.x