Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
> Does anybody know why mail servers look for line ends in messages?
> What are they trying to find?

Both SMTP and POP3 are text base protocols, and therefore work on *lines* of
text.  Most implementations read a line into some fixed size buffer, and
truncate if the input line exceeds the buffer size.  Frankly, truncating at
256 characters when you really should be sending lines no longer than 80 or
possible 132 doesn't seem so unreasonable to me.

Modern programs written when a few Mb isn't of much consequence might
reserver 1024 or more for a line.  If you really wanted to do it "right",
you would dynamically allocate a string as it comes in.  That's a lot more
trouble than most (all ?) SMTP server authors want to bother with,
especially since sending really long lines is silly in the first place.

I've always thought that the list server should automatically reject any
message with lines exceeding 256 characters, using HTML, base64 or other
fancy encoding, and that contained a previous footer added by the server
(indicating someone too lazy to properly trim a reply).  However I didn't
write the list server, so we have to put up with the occasional obnoxiously
formatted message.


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