Messaging across the Millennium

from the March 1999 issue of Business Communications Review, pp. 51–54

by Eric Arnum, editor of the Electronic Mail & Messaging Systems newsletter, a twice-monthly publication of Telecommunications Reports International, Inc.

By now, few enterprise network managers are treating the Millennium Bug as a joke. Indeed, as they evaluate their systems for Y2k compliance, an obvious area of focus has been those applications that clearly rely on date-sensitive processing. Among the leading areas of concern: messaging systems.

Everything an email system does is tracked, logged and time-stamped, so two-digit date fields clearly make these systems an area to watch when it comes to the millennium rollover. Furthermore, in the years approaching the end of the millennium, email has gone from techie toy to indispensable communications tool, preferred by many executives to phone or fax. The upshot is that when companies assess their Y2k vulnerability, email is one of the first items they look at.

Experts suggest that the biggest problem caused by Y2k incompatibility in an email system will be misinterpreted dates. For instance, 01/03/00 could be mistaken for January 3, 1900, which would cause a file or log entry to be dated a hundred years ago. How serious a problem is that? It might mean some messages fall through the cracks: since they appear to be a century old, these messages would show up at the bottom of a date-sorted inbox, where people who are always expecting new messages wouldnt normally look.

But the message will still be delivered, and the email system will still work. In other words, rather than calamity, messaging system vendors are talking about nuisances.

The core issue for messaging users is that it may be time to replace that old gear, and Y2k is as good a reason as any. Other good reasons include the explosion in users worldwide, the avalanche of messages they create and the multimedia content their messages increasingly contain. Because of the increased traffic and usage, old messaging systems from the mainframe and MS-DOS era are going to buckle soon, no matter what the date field reads.

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A more detailed discussion of the issues raised here
can be found in the print edition of this article.