> I notice that if someone sends a message to an IMail user, and the
> message contains lines of text that are longer than (around) 1024
> characters, those lines get truncated. Is this valid behaviour (by
> the SMTP standard)?
RFC821 (section 4.5.3) states that the maximum length of a "text line" (anything in
the actual E-mail, after the headers) is 1000 characters.
> Even if it's valid, there seem to be a lot of mail clients out there
> that send messages incorrectly with lines longer than that (mine
> included before I just changed it). Is there a way for me to change
> the limit in some configuration file or something?
Not that I'm aware of. It used to never be a problem, as computers only had 80
characters' width on the screens, so if anyone wrote an E-mail that had a line longer
than that, nobody would see it. Then, Mr. Microsoft decided that since it wanted
Windows to dominate the computer world, it would start letting people do weird things
like have lines that were 1,000 characters long. It would take these bogus lines and
split them onto multiple lines, so that they would look OK. That's cool until it
breaks software.
I remember when I first started getting E-mail from someone using Outlook. I had to
jump through hoops to try to figure out what was being sent, since my mail client did
what it was supposed to and displayed the lines as they were sent. Finally, the
E-mail clients gave up and started working around this Microsoft flaw/feature.
Even if IMail has a config option to allow longer lines, it will only be guaranteed to
work for local->local E-mail. Any E-mail coming from another mail server, or going to
another mail server, would likely have the lines truncated.
--
-Scott
Declude: Anti-virus and Anti-spam solutions for IMail. http://www.declude.com
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