Re: [exim] message has lines too long for transport

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Author: Heiko Schlichting
Date:  
To: Jarland Donnell via Exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] message has lines too long for transport
Jarland Donnell wrote:
> A new variable was added in 4.95: message_linelength_limit
>
> This defaults to RFC spec which is 998 characters, but that's not where the
> conversation should end. Absolutely no one out there is creating software
> that adheres to the RFC standard. You can send an email from Outlook,
> Roundcube, Thunderbird, or whatever which violates this standard and it will
> be accepted by all major email providers with no issue. It should therefore
> be expected that exim admins will not demand everyone suddenly adopt this
> old standard, but instead that they'll increase the value of this variable
> in their configs to compensate. Personally, I set my servers to 52428800 for
> it.


I was surprised that a value of 0 didn't completely disable this check.
So I changed src/transports/smtp.c:

-if (max_received_linelength > ob->message_linelength_limit)
+if (ob->message_linelength_limit > 0 && max_received_linelength > ob->message_linelength_limit)

and "set message_linelength_limit = 0" on all of my systems, which is what
I would have liked to see as Exim's default.

I see the good intention of enforcing RFCs, but it should be limited to
things that really make sense and not enforce otherworldly limits. And to
which - for good reason - no other software sticks.

Heiko

Heiko Schlichting                Freie Universität Berlin
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