On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, Edward Hibbert wrote:
> Suppose you have a message with 10,000 attachments.  How much effort do the
> server writers amongst you take to produce an accurate BODYSTRUCTURE for
> this, and allow FETCH to work on all of them?  Or 100,000...

I don't think that there is a particular "effort" in doing this, although
one can envision a server running out of memory.

> I couldn't see anything in RFC2060 about limits (which suggests I should
> handle it), but it is a Friday so I may have missed it.  I'm looking for
> some guidance along the lines of "tough, you must support it" or "you should
> NDR it if you're not going to" or "you can fudge it like this".

I would go with the "tough, you must support it".  If your server can't
handle a particular message, it should fail in some horrible way
indicating clearly that it's a bug in the server (e.g. crash+core dump)
rather than fudge and pretend that nothing is wrong.

It can then be discussed whether or not it is reasonable to expect your
server (or any server) to handle the particular message.  But, note that
the bar of what is "reasonable" tends to move with time; and what is
unreasonable in 2003 may be commonplace in 2013.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

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