Reading Pane Date Column Format Inconsistent

I am deploying Ubuntu in a community consisting of multiple learning disabled people and in our first adopter testing we have come up against an extremely frustrating problem.

There does not seem to be a way to format the Date or Received column to consistently show simply the Date and Time the message was sent or received.

These users are quite capable of using the information if it were presented in a way that is consistent but the current view seems completely relative with today's mail showing the time, yesterdays showing the word Yesterday and the time and so forth until you get far enough back to where it shows in the format of:

Month Day Time

For differently able users its very important to establish consistency in order to help them achieve competency and this really destroys that aspect for them. I'd prefer to have them all use Evolution just because I have used it for years and its easy for me to support this group of users when they use the same software I use.

I personally like the way it shows the Date and Time now, but the "friendly" interpretive view should be able to be disabled for people who need to see numbers in place of words.