>> As for a practial limit ... good question! I would guess that anything >> over a kilobyte would be asking for trouble. > >The RFC 5322 limit of 998 characters (excluding the trailing CRLF) >in a line would apply here, I believe. A variable amount of that >would be available for the display name, taking into account the >field name, punctation, and the real address(es).
That's for a SINGLE line. From §2.2.3 of RFC 5322: The process of moving from this folded multiple-line representation of a header field to its single line representation is called "unfolding". Unfolding is accomplished by simply removing any CRLF that is immediately followed by WSP. Each header field should be treated in its unfolded form for further syntactic and semantic evaluation. An unfolded header field has no length restriction and therefore may be indeterminately long. A display-name is a “phrase” in RFC 5322 parlance. A phrase consists of one or more “word”s. So you could have as many words as you want as long as you never exceeded the single-line size limit. And as I read RFC 5322 more closely, I see that a “quoted-string” can contain folding white space and can be folded, so you could in theory make one quoted-string that was a megabyte (but I think you'd be asking for trouble if you did that). --Ken _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
