[Mailman-Users] Question about CookHeaders

[John W. Baxter]

On 4/26/2004 13:53, "Bruce Embrey" <embrey at hood.edu> wrote:

> I have encountered a circumstance with Eudora users when receiving
> messages with long subject lines from mailman lists. The subject line in
> their email client is blank but if you open the message the entire
> subject line appears on a line beneath the blank one. I was looking
> through the CookHeaders.py script and saw the maxlinelen=78. What would
> be the consequences of increasing this number to 80 or 85?

One consequence would be a potential violation of a SHOULD in RFC
2822...potential in that a "helpful" MTA might "improve" the too-long
headers.

   There are two limits that this standard places on the number of
   characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than
   998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding
   the CRLF.

It is likely that the headers would look bad in other MUAs.

My memory is claiming that Mailman 2.1.1 was well known for this
problem...here's one reference to it:
http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/msg15984.html

  --John