Re: What is ridiculous

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Author: Nigel Metheringham
Date:  
To: Philip Hazel
CC: Ilya Ketris, exim-users
Subject: Re: What is ridiculous
} On Thu, 12 Sep 1996, Ilya Ketris wrote:
} 
} >    When you have quite a few addresses in the To:
} >    (some people are still sending bulk mail in such a
} >    way, unfortunately) exim fails and says:
} > 
} >    "Header line is ridiculously overlong",
} > 
} >    which is different from sendmail's behaviour ("But
} >    it worked for me everywhere else!").  Can we make
} >    it configurable maybe.
} 
} The current value is 8192 bytes. It seemed to me that any header line 
} longer than that was totally absurd! I could make it configurable, but 
} is that really sensible?


Is this for a single line, a single line with continuation - ie
    To: a, b, c,
        d, e, f
        g, h ,i


or for merged headers - ie how about a message with 60 Cc lines??

In our mail bomb episode, the headers accounted for something over
100K of the message (the body was around 1K). I suppose this means I
have a preference for there being a limit on total headers :-) I am
suprised that PC mailers could reply to the message without crashing
when they had to reconstruct the headers.

More seriously, is there a really good reason for limiting this
length at all, other than possibly as a per site policy decision?

    Nigel.


-- 
[ Nigel.Metheringham@???   - Unix Applications Engineer ]
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