Version: 1.9.5 (using KDE 3.5.5, Debian Package 4:3.5.5a.dfsg.1-3 (4.0)) Compiler: Target: i486-linux-gnu OS: Linux (i686) release 2.6.17-2-k7 I uses kmail under locale/language zh_CN. When I reply/forward a message, the composer starts quoting the original message in this way: "星期三 29 十一月 2006 11:17，somebody 写道" In case you can't read the above, I translate it as follows: "week-day-in-Chinese day-in-month month-in-Chinese year hour:minute" For a Chinese user, the format of date is rather bad, it's expected to be something like this: "2006年11月29日 星期三 11:17，..." translated: "year Chinese-word-'year' month Chinese-word-'month' day Chinese-word-'day' week-day-in-Chinese hour:minute" I have set "date and time formats" in kde-control-center to what I want (which used to be a solution to the problem); and have selected "local-zone" for "date display" in kmail settings(appearance page). Neither of them affects the composer's behaviour in writting the date. I suggest either the composer generate the %D phrase according to kde-control-center settings, or kmail provide extra phrase macros (place holders) like %Y %y %M %m %d (numbers that make up %D) so that users have a better control over it.
Since no one confirmed this bug for six months, I suspect the original bug report is not understood. So I'd like to explain it another way, which hopefully will make it more clear. I will use these notations (Chinese Pinyin actually) in the following explanation: NIAN: the word for 'year' in Chinese YUE: 'month' in Chinese RI: 'day' in Chinese XINGQI XXX: 'weekday' , In Chinese we say XINGQI {YI, ER, SAN, SI, WU, LIU, RI} instead of Monday through Sunday. The date line generated by kmail is: (SHIYI is 'eleven' in Chinese) XINGQI SAN 29 SHIYI YUE 2006 11:17 What I want (and most Chinese likes) is: (better without spaces) 2006 NIAN 11 YUE 29 RI XINGQI SAN 11:17 So the difference is about both ordering and wording, and I gave 2 suggestions: 1. generate %D according to kde-control-center "date and time formats" settings 2. Offer macros like %y, %m, %d, %w (for year number, month number, day number, weekday phrase, respectively). This is actually repeating the functionality provided in kde-control-center.
At least in kmail/KDE4 the date used in the reply mail (or better: the %ODATE macro as configured in the reply template) gets replaced with the long date format you can define in the systemsettings (aka kcontrol).