Line too long [rfc 2822, section 2.1.1]

[Rupert Gallagher <ru...@protonmail.com>]

A little survey on your local policies...

What do you do when a subject line is longer than 78 characters?

A. Reject
B. Accept as spam
C. Accept

Re: Line too long [rfc 2822, section 2.1.1]

["Kevin A. McGrail" <km...@apache.org>]

Accept.  Mail must flow and it's not a spam indicator.

On Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 14:49 Rupert Gallagher <ru...@protonmail.com> wrote:

> A little survey on your local policies...
>
> What do you do when a subject line is longer than 78 characters?
>
> A. Reject
> B. Accept as spam
> C. Accept
>

Re: Line too long [rfc 2822, section 2.1.1]

[David B Funk <db...@engineering.uiowa.edu>]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2018, Rupert Gallagher wrote:

> A little survey on your local policies...
> What do you do when a subject line is longer than 78 characters? 
> 
> A. Reject
> B. Accept as spam
> C. Accept

That clause for 78 chars is a "SHOULD", the "MUST" is for 998 chars.
It then also says:

         Again, even though this limitation is put on
    messages, it is encumbant upon implementations which display messages
    to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line
    (certainly at least up to the 998 character limit) for the sake of
    robustness.

I've regularly seen "important" messages with subjects over 500 chars
(ones that our users complain about if not delivered normally).

So subject length > 78 is not a hard spam sign.


-- 
Dave Funk                                  University of Iowa
<dbfunk (at) engineering.uiowa.edu>        College of Engineering
319/335-5751   FAX: 319/384-0549           1256 Seamans Center
Sys_admin/Postmaster/cell_admin            Iowa City, IA 52242-1527
#include <std_disclaimer.h>
Better is not better, 'standard' is better. B{

Re: Line too long [rfc 2822, section 2.1.1]

[Joseph Brennan <br...@columbia.edu>]

Longer than 300 characters gets spam points.

Longer than 78 is technically allowed so long as the raw message has it
broken into continuation lines. We arbitrarily decided that 300 characters
indicates either the ravings of a lunatic or the output of spamware, and
it's been accurate. Most commonly the Subject contains what should have
been the message body.

-- 
Joseph Brennan
Lead, Email and Systems Applications

Re: Line too long [rfc 2822, section 2.1.1]

[Bill Cole <sa...@billmail.scconsult.com>]

On 13 Jul 2018, at 14:49, Rupert Gallagher wrote:

> A little survey on your local policies...
>
> What do you do when a subject line is longer than 78 characters?
>
> A. Reject
> B. Accept as spam
> C. Accept

Accept, absent some actual spam sign.

Note that the 78-character recommendation is not applicable to logical 
(decoded and unfolded) header fields but only to lines in the 
uninterpreted & unmodified transport format. To catch that in SA, a test 
would be something like:

header LONG_SUBJ_LINE Subject:raw =~ /.{79,}/m


And that will match mail that many people really want to not be blocked.