Subject: ?: Pine + Sun Mailtool + Content-Length

From: [email-masked] (Jaakko Salminen - Sun Finland)
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 13:26:53 +0200

Hello everyone,

I tried to find this in the FAQ-lists and mail archives with 
no success, so here goes..

Sun Mailtool uses the Content-Length header line to determine 
the actual lenght of an email. This is particularly useful when
sending a mailfolder or email messages as an attachment, because
they have lines beginning with From: that are really just
part of the message, not the beginning of another.

Pine doesn't seem to use the Content-Length line, it breaks 
messages with other messages as attachments to separate messages.
Have I missed something obvious or is this an incompatibility
between Sun Mailtool and Pine?

RTFMs and pointers are welcome.

Jaakko Salminen
Technical Support Engineer 
Sun Microsystems Finland

---

From: Ed Greshko <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 20:31:43 -0800 (GMT)

> RTFMs and pointers are welcome.

	I seem to have misplaced it....but Mark Crispin had an excellent
piece on "horrors of Content-Length".

	Bottom line, it is not a reliable header.  Much can happen to a
message as it passes between MTAs that can have an effect on the
actual length of a message.  Can you imagine what would happen is an
MTA converted CR into CR+LF and the Content-Length remained unchanged?
The message:

	...make sure you turn the power off

may be displayed instead of what was actually received.

	...make sure you turn the power off and then on after changing the
	switch setting.  Failure to do so.....

	Just like there are lots of good reasons that pine doesn't use
uuencode there are other good reasons why it doesn't use Content-Length:

	The *real* question you should be asking is...."Why does SUN
insist on using Content-Length: headers?

						Ed