[Sderby] Billion seconds passed since 1970 Unix incept date bug.

[L L Proud]

Hi guys,

My email is now all set-up and working correctly.

Some of you may remember the old computer DOM installed
my friends SuSE 6.2 onto, well he's now getting his email set-up and
he's found a problem on the KMail website regarding his system.

His hardware is a bit limited. He has a Cyrix 586 running at 200 MHz, 
which looks like a Pentium at 233 MHz. He only has 32 Mb of RAM,
and a 1Gb harddisk.

He is trying to use KMAIL1.0.21 and KDE1.1.1 and his Kernal is 2.2.10

He has been configuring his email account for the first time and 
while looking on the KMail website found the following message which 
he has forwarded to me.


#########################################################

KMail - Important announcement for users of KMail 1.0.x / KDE 1.x

Old versions of KMail will stop working correctly on September 9,  
2001.  On that date, a number overflow may cause KMail mail folders 
to be corrupted  when using KMail version < 1.0.29.1. If you are 
using version 1.0.29.1 or 1.0.29.2, the dates of new mails will not 
be shown correctly anymore, but no mail will be lost. This is 
actually the problem raised by the passage of one billion seconds 
since the beginning of the Unix epoch
at 00:00 on 1 January 1970.

The affected versions of KMail were part of KDE 1.x which, though 
replaced by KDE 2.x,  remain part of distributions still on sale and 
part of many users'desktops.  What to do?

We recommend that users update to KDE 2.2, which includes KMail 1.3. 
This version has many other bugs fixed and contains many new features.

The new version of KMail will use old mail files without problems. 
However, once the new version is installed one should not 
switch back to the old version because of changes in the index files 
and configuration file. Just to be sure, we recommend that users make 
a backup of their mail folder (~/Mail) and compress all folders before
switching to the new version.

Oh dear !!!  His email is working as I've received test messages from 
him, but he's very concerned about this problem with the dates & 
files. 

The problem as I see it is he cannot easily do a major upgrade of the
software, 32Mb isn't enough for KDE 2.X which the message recommends.

The message seems to imply that in order to upgrade KMail to a 
version that does not have this problem, an upgrade to KDE 2.X is 
necessary.

What are the options for fixing this ?

1) Is it possible to upgrade KMail to a later version without the     
    resource hit of KDE 2.X on his memory.

2) Is there another GUI based email program that does not have this
    problem.

3)  SuSE Linux 6 was available in two further versions -6.3, and 6.4
     I wonder what versions of Kmail were in those releases.

Any helpful information you might have that I can pass on would be 
greatly appreciated.

Thank-you

Regards Laurie 

-- 
KMail SuSE Linux