Re: [Nmh-workers] why does mhfixmsg dislike long text lines?

[Andy Bradford]

Thus said David Levine on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 20:43:50 -0500:

> > The  comment  in  mhfixmsg  which  I  quoted  at  the  beginning  of
> > this thread  seems to  be saying  that sometimes  message components
> > described  as  text/*   are  really  binary  files,   and  that  the
> > 998-character limit  is used  in mhfixmsg (only)  as a  heuristic to
> > identify this situation.
>
> I  wouldn't call  it a  heuristic. It's  definitive, according  to RFC
> 2045.

One of the reasons why RFC 2045  has this definition can be found in RFC
5321 (previously 2821, previously 821) where a Text Line is defined:

4.5.3.1.6.  Text Line

   The maximum total length of a text line including the <CRLF> is 1000
   octets (not counting the leading dot duplicated for transparency).
   This number may be increased by the use of SMTP Service Extensions.

So, regardless  of the on-disk  format or how  a message might  meet RFC
5322, if  it wants to be  sent via SMTP, it  will have to be  encoded in
some fashion (enter MIME, uuencode, etc...).

Andy
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