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Re: [Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-moore-mail-nr-fields-00.txt]

2004-09-28 01:46:27

On Sat, 25 Sep 2004, Bruce Lilly wrote:

Don't blame MUAs for MTA bugs.  My local file copy's References
field was exactly 998 octets long (not including the CRLF), which
is perfectly legal. A copy of that sent through my local MTA came
back with the Received field in the same state.  A copy sent to
my ISP's MTA (Exim) came back with line folding inserted after
the 989th octet (the letter 'a'). Looks like bugs in Exim (989
instead of 998, and a botched folding algorithm). 

Exim does not deliberately modify message headers or message bodies
apart from the required minimum such as adding Received: and translating
CRLF into LF for local storage. I am firmly of the opinion that messing
around with message content is not the job of an MTA. There is
definitely no code for folding header lines in Exim. I have just double-
checked by sending a message with a References: line that was over 1,000
characters long. (I am the author of Exim, incidentally.)

It is possible for a sysadmin to configure Exim to remove and add header 
lines. It is probably possible to try to make it fold by a sufficiently
hacky configuration, but that's the fault of the writer of the 
configuration, not Exim. I suspect that some other software is involved
at your ISP.

Philip

-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10(_at_)cus(_dot_)cam(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 
1223 334714.


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