Re: few questions
* On 2004.07.07, in <20040707142709.GA17958@bucovina>,
* "Ionel Mugurel Ciobica" <tgakic@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> See the file attached (color_body.muttrc). Also have a look at
> http://bucovina.chem.tue.nl/mutt_color.png, to see what I am talking
> about. Only about 1000 characters follows the color scheme.
Ah! Any time a problem in Internet mail occurs "about 1000 characters",
that's a pretty sure indication of why it's happening. :)
That's fair behavior for mutt, though admittedly not ideal. SMTP only
requires transport to honor lines of up to 998 characters. A client that
sends lines longer than 998 characters is in danger of having lines
clipped altogether upon receipt by the destination SMTP agent. (It's
lucky if lines longer than 1000 characters come though at all.)
Mutt doesn't speak SMTP, so that's not directly relevant. However,
because of this, RFC 2822 (governing internet message format) also
restricts line length to 998 characters. From section 2.2.1:
The 998 character limit is due to limitations in many
implementations which send, receive, or store Internet
Message Format messages that simply cannot handle more than
998 characters on a line. Receiving implementations would
do well to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters
in a line for robustness sake. However, there are so many
implementations which (in compliance with the transport
requirements of [RFC2821]) do not accept messages containing
more than 1000 character including the CR and LF per line, it
is important for implementations not to create such messages.
RFC 2822 effectively says that it would be nice for mutt to honor lines
longer than 998 characters, but it is not required to. Displaying long
lines, but not coloring the tail end, might be seen as a bug on the
basis that mutt should choose between chopping long lines altogether and
coloring the entirety, but should not color partial lines.
... in case anyone wants to take up the cause in code, there's the
justification. :)
--
-D. dgc@xxxxxxxxxxxx NSIT::ENSS
No money, no book. No book, no study. No study, no pass.
No pass, no graduate. No graduate, no job. No job, no money.
T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f C h i c a g o