I've noticed since late March / early April, every new e-mail that arrives when the Mail.app is open has a date of 12/31/1969.

If the Mail.app isn't running, then the date shows up fine / normal.

Or if I close Mail, and open it again, then the date is fine.

I just have no clue what's causing this.

Any ideas?

Mike

The email app's date handling is somewhat bogus. For unread emails it seems to show either the date/time of reception (to the N8x0, i.e. time of last sync), or 12/31/1969, alternatively 01/01/1970 for those in a timezone east of GMT. Pretty useless all in all, as the interesting time to most people is the actual Date: field in the email header.

The 1969/1970 time reflects a Unix time of 0, as it starts counting from 01/01/1970. It looks like the email app starts out with time 0, then at some point it shows the reception time, and when it's read it shows the real Date:
All pretty stupid and buggy, and probably a piece of cake to fix if only Nokia had released the full sources for the email app. Which they didn't do, and afaik rejected all bug reports as well (which means they will never be fixed).

But they never need fixed (as far as Nokia's concerned), as we've got Modest (which is open-source) in all future releases. I really don't blame them for not open-sourcing it since Modest was adopted as a planned replacement. It'd be a waste of resources, really; as long as they're replacing closed software with open, I see it as progress.

There's Modest, of course, but it's a really bad excuse from Nokia because the existing, buggy client has been out for 17 months at least (and then I don't know anything about OS2006), and Modest is _still_ not ready. It's one thing not fixing an application because there'll be a replacement in a month or possibly two, deep into the second year is a completely different story. Very, very different. Untolerable, really.

Modest has been working up since 2006 at the earliest. It's really not as intolerable as you think.

There was never an installable version for OS2007, and it's not long since packages for OS2008 finally started to become available. To get access to a version that could be run on OS2007 was until recently not for the general user, or even faint-hearthed developer. I know, I went through the procedure. I stand by my argument. osso-email has been the only integrated alternative for a very, very long time, bugs and all.

The obvious answer is, upgrade to something that's not ridiculously obsolete.

The point is, it has been slated to be replaced for a long while, so why would they put work into something that was just going into the junk heap? Yeah, it's been very broken for a long time (though, perhaps, not quite as much as a lot of people hyped it up to be) and that was unfortunate, but we're looking to the future now, so there's no point in dwelling on the past.