Re: Netscape 6.5 mail on MS Win98 - Y2K problem?

[Tom Reingold <tommy@bell-labs.com>]

On Tue, 04 Jan 2000 17:25:45 EST,
	anderson johnston <ajohns5@alumni.umbc.edu> wrote:

> We've been getting reports from Win98 users that Netscape 6.5 mail has
> been sending messages with the year 1969 in the timestamp.  There is
> something banging in long-term storage about a 1969 timestamp and MS
> operating systems - specifically DOS.  Has anyone else run into this
> problem?  Does anybody remember more clearly than I what it is I'm trying
> to think of? 

DOS's clock can't go back that far.  I think it can only go back to 
1980.  1969 is the moment before the beginning of time in UNIX.  C 
libraries for MS operating systems emulate UNIX libraries, which is 
why you get UNIX-like behavior often.  I've seen this behavior this 
week.  In our case, the cause was a non-compliant mailer in UNIX 
(elm) sending out mail with the year 100.  Since netscape can't deal 
with that date, it thinks it means 1969, which indicates it's using 
one of those unix-emulation C libraries.  It's a bug in netscape, but 
I might not report it, since the fault lies in the mailer that sent 
the mail.  Are you sure the PC version of netscape is SENDING mail 
with a bad date stamp?



-- 
Tom Reingold
tommy@bell-labs.com                 http://www.bell-labs.com/~tommy
Bell Labs, the Research and Development unit of Lucent Technologies
Murray Hill, NJ, 07974-0636 US