Fwd: Re: formatting and addresses - Hodges

[Paul Hodges]

On Sat, 03 Jul 1999 08:56:07 -0700 (PDT), Bill Wood wrote:

>   The 998-character max line length seems
>  in practice to vary, with many at about 1024 characters
>  (apparently enforced by network servers??). How old is
>  this std? I can't imagine the need for such a
>  limitation today. 

This is stated in RFC821 (para 4.5.3), and has been reaffirmed in
later standards.

However, my previous message somewhat misrepresented the standard
which gives this length as a "minimum maximum".

The standard explicitly says that implementations must be able to
receive this length but "must not send" longer, but the next sentence
(in capitals, and repeated lower down) urges that implementation
techniques should be used that do not inherently force this
limitation.  This qualification implies a desire to remove the
(strictly mandatory) limitation of the previous sentence, but nothing
has apparently been done about it.

Paul Hodges
QBS Software Ltd