[quote user="Jerry Wise"]I would direct you to RFC5322 (the latest on the subject) where absolute limit is 998 chars but the SHOULD limit is 78 chars per line. HTML or plain text does not change the requirements or recommendation.[/quote]

Well, although this is true the reality is more complicated, and as a (kind of) co-developer I personally would work around this by being tolerant when reading such messages: In current days there's almost no RAM limit other than by design (i.e. 4 GB on 32bit systems and much much more (2^64) on 64bit systems) and I'm confident that this would suffice to accomodate any line length currently seen (unless specially crafted for overflow testing). If creators of such messages simply used quoted-printable for wrapping these lines we wouldn't even see this issue at all, but again: Reality is more complicated ...

Summary:

Messages with too long lines are part of internet reality. Different

methods for handling long lines exist. Truncating is just one of them

and makes Pegasus look bad. Splitting lines would also work and have the added benefit of making Pegasus look good.

Background:

Some mailers, notably Hotmail, produce lines exceeding length limits set by RFCs and/or Pegasus internals. Replying to such messages results in the quoted text being arbitrarily truncated regardless of whether the reply is "plain" or formatted. Progressively less of this quoted conversation history remains if such a message is replied to several times, thus being sent back and forth between parties.

Although this is not a defect in Pegasus, the user experience is such that Pegasus is likely to be blamed for the annoyance, because even HTML messages that display in their entirety get truncated when being replied to.

See also this thread: http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/21532.aspx 

Suggestion:

I suggest that long lines should be split rather than just truncated, at least when replying to HTML messages. If possible, this should happen already when receiving messages from the internet.

I would direct you to RFC5322 (the latest on the subject) where absolute limit is 998 chars but the SHOULD limit is 78 chars per line. HTML or plain text does not change the requirements or recommendation.

[quote user="Jerry Wise"]I would direct you to RFC5322 (the latest on the subject) where absolute limit is 998 chars but the SHOULD limit is 78 chars per line. HTML or plain text does not change the requirements or recommendation.[/quote]

Thanks Jerry, that's where I got the numbers from.

Should I suppose that we arrived at the same conclusion, or is there anything about the background or suggestion that needs clarifying?