Hello All, A few times over the last month I've received email messages which were clearly incomplete.
After a little investigation I discovered that the as-sent emails contained message bodies with very long [unwrapped] single lines. The critical line length is 1000 characters: when emailer retrieves messages from the server, it silently truncates lines containing more than 1000 characters at the 1000th character. Mac OS X's Mail application retrieved and displayed the complete message, confirming that Emailer was truncating lines containing more than 1000 characters. I'm hesitant to say that the long lines in the original messages contravene one or more RFCs, as I only have passing familiarity with them. I do note that RFC 2821 "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol" <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2821.html> says, in part, that The maximum total length of a text line including the <CRLF> is 1000 characters (not counting the leading dot duplicated for transparency). RFC 2822 "Internet Message Format" <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html> confirms that Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF. ... Again, even though this limitation is put on messages, it is encumbant [sic. Read: /incumbent/ - Mr. Noyb] upon implementations which display messages to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line (certainly at least up to the 998 character limit) for the sake of robustness. As this is a rare problem, I can't say with any certainty which MUAs (Mail User Agents; email clients) are generating long lines. While laying the blame on the manufacturers of offending MUAs for failing to wrap lines longer than 998 characters may be attractive, I doubt that it would be productive. Can a work-around be found for this problem? Depending on how Emailer was coded, it may be possible to increase Emailer's truncation limit by editing the application binary. Finding the right number to change could be done by brute force, assuming it's that simple, but that would take more time than I can spare. One or other of the original Emailer authors would be in a better position to fix this problem, if a fix is indeed possible. Comments on this subject would be most welcome. Mr. Noyb. ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
