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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