> On 12 Oct 2021, at 07:19, John via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> wrote: > > Hello Matt, > > The answer is yes, it's not good practice to block messages containing long > lines in emails. That will likely cause problems at either the sender or > recipient. Senders may receive non-delivery notifications, recipients may > miss mails. > > RFC5322 (2008) advises to handle long lines at least up to 998 characters. > However, there is no pressing technical need to filter. The 1000 character > rule appeared in rfc821 (1982), probably because it was believed that it was > a good idea to limit the format to the capacity of hardware and software at > the time. We've moved on, systems have sufficient memory and mail readers > have been smart enough to wrap long lines for a long time already.
Indeed. There were a lot of fixed limitations at the time, and that was at least in part due to common use of language constructs such as Pascal’s readln which took a fixed limit based on the size of the declared array. Dynamic arrays were not yet a thing, as I recall. Having written some of that code for TOPS-20, I just imagine how badly it would behave in today’s world. There are still reasons to be a bit concerned if you see lines greater than the limit, the biggest of which is if someone is attempting to exercise a parser, either yours or someone else’s down the line. I doubt such an attack would succeed today, but who knows? Eliot
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