Subject: Maximum number of entries in Address List

From: Dan Mandell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 1994 16:32:41 -0500 (EST)

Does anyone know what the max. number of addresses for an address book list?

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Dan Mandell, Computer Services, Saint Mary's College      
Internet: [email-masked]

"Others promise you the World. We deliver!":  New York Times

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From: [email-masked] (David E. Gatehouse)
Date: 13 Aug 1994 22:14:03 GMT

Dan Mandell ([email-masked]) wrote:
: Does anyone know what the max. number of addresses for an address book list?

As far as I can gather the max is 40!  Try it and see.

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 1994 23:13:07 -0700 (PDT)

There is no defined limit.  Pine 3.89 and before store the entire list in
memory, so there will be a practical limit though... 

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, JE-20
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

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From: [email-masked] (jeffery sumler)
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 02:17:56 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>As far as I can gather the max is 40!  Try it and see.

This comment from adrbklib.h (pine 3.89) indicates that each entry in
the addressbook can contain up to 1000 addresses. I tested this while
writing a little program that converted VMS distribution lists to pine
addressbook entries and I think I got 1010 or so before pine dumped
core. 

from adrbklib.h:
/* There are no restrictions on the length on any of the fields. This current
   code restricts the number of addresses in a list to 1000.
 */

jeff sumler
[email-masked]

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Aug 1994 22:00:56 -0700 (PDT)

We have gone to considerable effort to upgrade addressbook support in Pine
3.90 to handle huge addressbooks with reasonable performance.  One of our
test addressbooks has over 10,000 entries.  Pine 3.89 does crash on a
sendmail bug with large numbers of recipients, but that is also solved in 
Pine 3.90...

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From: [email-masked] (jeffery sumler)
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 06:20:59 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>sendmail bug with large numbers of recipients, but that is also solved in 

Cool. Please understand that I wasn't criticizing pine on this point - I
think 1,000 entries per list is a reasonable limit. At one point my test
addressbook has over 15,000 entries, divided into approximately 15 lists
with 1,000 entries per list and pine worked just fine. I only hit this
limit because some of our users maintained enormous administrative
mailing lists (~3,000 entries typically) under VMS and wanted to move
them to pine's addressbook, since they were being "encouraged" to move
their email activities from our VMS cluster to our primary unix
email host.

Actually, since it's late and I'm tired :), I'll ramble on a bit. I
think support for huge mailing lists within a MUA like pine or elm or 
mh or whatever is ultimately a misplaced effort. Big mailing lists (where
big >= 100 entries) are best handled by network information providers
(NIS, Hesiod), by an MTA database (sendmail's aliases file for example) or
by a dedicated mailing list manager (e.g. MajorDomo). There's no reason
to force a MUA to bear the burden of parsing and formatting enormous
lists while striving to be "interactive", when such tasks can be more
handled more efficiently and at less cost (in user time and cycles) by a
background MTA or better yet by a list manager on another host. 

I've been spending far too much time with sendmail and BIND lately, so
I'll go get a life now :)

jeff sumler