On 9/10/01 at 1:17 PM -0500, Eric A. Hall wrote:
>1) There does not appear to be a requirement for a space after the
>colon in the header field...
That is correct. Though a space definitely makes it more readable and
lots of clients produce the space, it is not required at all, I've
seen messages without, and I've never seen anybody fail to parse a
header without a space.
I've seen these as well, and I've never seen anything that had a problem.
>2) Although any printable character from US-ASCII except colon may
>be used in header names, I've never seen any headers use anything
>other than alphanumerics and hyphen.
I've never seen one that I can recall. Anyone else?
Hmm. I've seen $ and # and * for sure. I think I've seen % and ^ once or twice,
but it was probably an error of some sort that led to it. I've seen ( and ) and
; used, but it was _definitely_ bogus usage -- leakage from GroupWise, if
memory serves.
>...with the entire unfolded header field within 998 bytes.
I've met many an address field that is well over 998 bytes unfolded.
Biggest real and intentional usage I've seen was on the order of 25Mb.
Lots of things didn't handle it at all well.
Ned