Re: [Emailcore] Ticket #14: G.7.8. Review different size limits

Vote against changing existing limits, it is not just MTA's that have to 
deal with this, but many email analytics programs etc..

But I agree that we should consider some 'best practices' size limits on 
headers..

Can we start looking at existing limits in more details?

But as I think John pointed out, creators of HTML messages have long be 
operating with poor practices.  Have even seen some messages where the 
whole HTML part was on a single line. But we could have a SHOULD 
indication of max line limits, while a long line is 'technically' not an 
issue, there are many practical examples why it is not preferred, eg 
string matching in long lines, not to mention simple things like viewing 
a message source and how ugly difficult this is when the message creates 
a very long scroll window.

On 2021-07-16 8:34 a.m., Ned Freed wrote:
>> On Fri 16/Jul/2021 00:19:21 +0200 John Levine wrote:
>> > It appears that Viktor Dukhovni  <emailcore@ietf.org> said:
>> >>> On 15 Jul 2021, at 4:16 pm, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> PS: I don't feel strongly about lifting the 1000 octet limit but I 
>> would like
>> >>> to understand how widely it's enforced by mail receivers.
>> >>
>> >>On the receiving side Postfix does not enforce any physical
>> >>line length limits on message body lines, ...
>> >
>> > I realize qmail isn't very popular any more, although you will find
>> > it hiding in the guts of a lot of packaged mail systems.  For incoming
>> > messages, it's all dynamic and there's no length limits.  For outgoing
>> > messages it politely wraps headers to 80 bytes but leaves bodies alone.
> 
> 
>> Courier has similar limits on submission.  Some 100000 for the whole 
>> header
>> (configurable since 2007, BOFHHEADERLIMIT) and 5000 bytes line length 
>> limit.
> 
> It's really quite unfortunate that there's no limit specified on header
> size, since sending a huge header is yet another way to exhaust resources
> on a poorly implemented MTA.
> 
> However, adding one is clearly beyond the scope of what we're allowed to
> do in emailcore. Even a change to make the limits we have "real" is pushing
> it.
> 
>                  Ned
> 
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>> -- 
>> Emailcore mailing list
>> Emailcore@ietf.org
>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/emailcore
> 

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