Re: [Nmh-workers] Default and selectable Content-Transfer-Encoding issues

[Ken Hornstein]

>>     maximum-unencoded-line-length
>>         Messages that contain lines longer than the value of this
>>         variable are encoded in quoted-printable even if they contain
>>         only ASCII characters.  The maximum effective value is 950.  If
>>         set to 0, all ASCII text messages are encoded in
>>         quoted-printable.  S/MIME signed messages are always encoded in
>>         quoted-printable regardless of the value of this variable.
>> 
>> Don't know if that helps.  Perhaps it could default to 76 and all of us
>> will just crank it up to the max, being sure that we're under sendmail's
>> break-line-with-a-! limit.
>
>I like that.

I concur, although I'm not sure what the option should be called, because
that thing is kinda long.  Maybe -maxunencoded?

>I think the default could be 78 instead of 76.  76 is the max
>length of an encoded q-p text line.  78 is the "SHOULD" limit
>for unencoded text [RFC 5322, Sec. 2.1.1].  And 998 could be the
>max to comply with the RFC and in turn keep sendmail happy.

Yeah, looking at the RFCs again, I believe you're right.

Ralph writes:
>Does the 76 historically come from 78 - strlen("> ") to allow for a
>simple single-level of quoting?

You know ... I'm not sure why that is.  You still need to count "> " in
the line length, so it doesn't gain anything.  You don't count the CRLF,
but you never count the CRLF for the 78 character limit either.

--Ken