Mike Leone on Sat, 1 Sep 2001 01:30:15 +0200


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[PLUG] WARNING: KMail stops working after Unix passes 1 billiioneth second


As an adjunct to our "Billion Second Party" talk, here's a warning for
anybody who might still be using KMail on KDE 1.x .....

====================================================

Subject: KMail - Important announcement for users of KMail 1.0.x / KDE 1.x
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 01:02:17 +0200
From: Daniel Naber

[Please help to spread this information and take appropriate actions
if you or your customers are affected]

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 2.1, which includes KMail 1.2. 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.

This announcement is also available at
http://kmail.kde.org/bug.html



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