2.1.1. Line Length Limits
There are two limits that this standard places on the number of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF.
And the next paragraph reads:
The 998 character limit is due to limitations in many implementations which send, receive, or store Internet Message Format messages that simply cannot handle more than 998 characters on a line. Receiving implementations would do well to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line for robustness sake. However, there are so many implementations which (in compliance with the transport requirements of [RFC2821]) do not accept messages containing more than 1000 character including the CR and LF per line, it is important for implementations not to create such messages.
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Courier limits lines to 5,000 characters, well above the required minimum.and we're increasingly finding cases where this is breaking on our server.Software that generates lines of text longer than 5,000 characters is definitely broken.
Lines in an E-mail message must have a limit in order to prevent denial-of-service attacks. 5,000 characters, no matter how you look at it, is more than reasonable.
Besides the DOS argument, what harm is their in handling "an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line"? And there must be a way around the DOS-line length argument, unless Sendmail, and Postfix, and Exim, and MS Exchange (!) are all susceptible to this DOS attack?
best, Jeff
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