RE: [courier-users] Re: Maximal length of To: header

From: Greg Earle [mailto:earle@isolar.DynDNS.ORG]
>
> I'm getting several messages a day rejected with
>
> 534 Message header size, or recipient list, exceeds policy
> limit.
>
> I had 2 of these too-large messages forwarded to me separately,
> and what I found was this:
>
> One message had a "To: " line that was split across 135 lines,
> each with 2 recipients on it, and all but the first line indented
> with a <Tab>, as required. So there were 270 recipients
> specified, and the total size of that header alone was 8027 bytes
> - and note that this was *not* all on one unbroken line without
> any \n, either.
>
> (The other message was slightly smaller; 95 lines and 189
> recipients. Also over 5000 characters total; 6000-something.)
>
> People on the "techie" side (us) will say things like
> "poorly-written mail client", "completely unreasonable", and
> "they should use a Bcc: list, or a mailing list". (My officemate
> did just that, when I told him about the problem.)
>
> But try telling that to a secretary using Eudora (one of the
> worst abominations I've ever encountered in an e-mail client) who
> has to send out e-mails to hundreds of people on Flight Projects
> and at vendor sites, etc. - i.e. across easily-set boundaries (so
> in other words, making a mailing list isn't possible because the
> recipient list is fluid). It just isn't going to work. And my
> problem is that if a secretary sends out e-mails to 190 or 270
> people and the only person(s) who doesn't get it is someone on my
> Courier server, the net result will be that I get in hot water
> because the person didn't get their important e-mail that all
> their colleagues got. And the people who don't get their e-mails
> will abandon mine and switch to the Institutional server(s),
> because those don't have this "problem".

I have the same problem. There is only one line of code that needs
to be modified to fix this problem, so I just fix it whenever I
build Courier.

In the source directory, edit the file courier/submit.C and make
this change:

Original: if (l > headerlimit || l > 5000)
Fixed: if (l > headerlimit)

The headerlimit gives you a 100k limit, which is much more
reasonable.

This will fix the header size problem. You can still get the 534
error if there are more than 5000 characters on a single line in
the email, but that doesn't cause nearly as many problems as the
5000 character overall limit.

Bowie


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