>> It may be worth James and co looking at this.

> It's not their problem.  Everything is working correctly.

for some values of correctly.

> The only problem
> is bozos who insist on sending long lines even though they are not 
> specified
> to be handled correctly.

If we all limited ourselves to remaining within guaranteed rule sets 
and/or stuck to all the rules all the time life would be very dull 
indeed. As you yourself seem to acknowledge by breaking rules in the 
process of railing against rules being broken :-)

> SMTP has an upper limit on line lengths that a complient server must 
> handle.
> SMTP only guarantees 1000 characters, although servers are 
> encouraged to
> make the limit as long as possible.  From RFC 821: ..
>    The maximum total length of a text line including the
>    <CRLF> is 1000 characters

This exmple truncated at 256 characters.

> POP3 doesn't explicitly set a guaranteed minimum line length that 
> will
> always be handled correctly, and implementations therefore vary 
> widely.
> It's hard to imagine a POP3 server not at least allowing 132 
> character
> lines, but there are definitely implementations that truncate at 255
> characters.  I think this is exactly what we are seeing, and why 
> different
> list subscribers see long lines in different ways.


I'm sure you're right. But if I was going to start being rude and 
calling people bozos (a version of 'stupid' as far as I can tell I'd 
start with people who write POP3 implementations that fail to 
accomodate acceptable SMTP limits. A chain is as strong as its weakest 
link, and one can be CERTAIN that implementing a product which accepts 
a subset of another standard because some other standard is sloppy and 
allows you to be sloppy as well by default, is going to cause 
problems. Odds are that the 'problem' software was first written when 
memory was expensive and '8 bits was good enough for anyone' and they 
have never caught up with reality.

> So once again, DON'T SEND WHOLE PARAGRAPHS AS SINGLE LINES.

I can obviously see the merit in this 'suggestion' BUT I greatly 
dislike the mess caused when various systems truncate lines at 
different but similar lengths and the lines then have varying numbers 
of quoting characters added to the front. The effect can be that a 
hard break is added, then the line subsequently grows over the limit, 
so the line is folded again, and then some othe rline length limit is 
imposed and the line is broken again etc. The end result ends up 
looking like this.

> You could do Doppler microwave underneath the car without too many
> problems.
> Cosine error would have to be dealt with, but that ends up as a
> constant.
> Then you just look at how fast you are slowing down, and handle the
> brake lights appropriately.

OR

> The product requires NO skill to install.  If it requires power that
> could come from the
> cigarette lighter socket.  The user can put it in the back window or
> mount it anywhere
> they want.

OR

>>I designed my OmniPort board to be a do-it-all board 
>>(http://www.dpharris.ca/index.pl/block_diagram) and it
>works fine.  I
>>populated one with lots of sockets and it is a great
>prototyping board.

OR

> > for instance: there should be an integer type that is at least
> > 0..255, but maps to the 'best' machine type. This could be
> a byte on a
> > PIC, but on an ARM probably a 32-bit word.
>
Or far worse


This would tend to be avoidaable if the systems allowed paragraphs to 
be treated without breaks AND quoting took prope cognisance of this.
Too much to ask, I know.


> In fact if I
> was running a list server, I'd be tempted to impolitely discard any 
> message
> containing a line exceeding 132 characters.

Why doesn't that surprise me at all ? :-)

> Only spammers and bozos do
> that, neither of which are worth bothering with.

That observation is, of course, a tautology. Spammers may do it for 
all I know (haven't noticed) but you are defining bozos by their 
behaviour. It's not possible to obtain an example of a person who does 
this who you would not be able to label as a bozo. It would be as 
fair, and arguably as accurate, to label everyone with surname Lathrop 
as being a bozo :-)


        RM.

I wonder how long my longest unbroken paragraphs have been ? :-)



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