[Mailman-Users] Header folding - was: body text size limit

[Mark Sapiro]

David Hláčik wrote:
> Hello, we have noticed, that mailman is breaking long subject values with
> newlines. What is the motivation for doing this?


RFC 2822 section 2.1.1 and 2.2.3

2.1.1. Line Length Limits

    There are two limits that this standard places on the number of
    characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than
    998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding
    the CRLF.
    [...]

2.2.3. Long Header Fields

    Each header field is logically a single line of characters comprising
    the field name, the colon, and the field body.  For convenience
    however, and to deal with the 998/78 character limitations per line,
    the field body portion of a header field can be split into a multiple
    line representation; this is called "folding".  The general rule is

    that wherever this standard allows for folding white space (not
    simply WSP characters), a CRLF may be inserted before any WSP.  For
    example, the header field:

            Subject: This is a test

    can be represented as:

            Subject: This
             is a test
    [...]

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan