hmm - good point. We're using IMAP actually, not POP3, maybe that's the reason?

I'll do a test with POP3 as well.

I doubt if this will make any difference at all since I was reading my 130 character subject sent with Thunderbird  3 through Mercury to GMail and a local account using Webmail,  POP3 and IMAP4. 

I did do a test with sending a line greater that 127 character Subject with PMail (v4.53 beta 2) and it appears that PMail will truncate the subject to 127 characters when building the actual message.  I get this using both the internal mailer and Mercury UDG.  I did not try this with any of the release versions of PMail.

By accident I found that there seems to be a explicit limit on the maximum length of the subject line in Mercury. When sending an e-mail to Mercury (tried it with MS Outlook Exchange 2007 and Thunderbird clients) that is longer than 127 characters, Mercury truncates it. Is this a bug or a feature? I would expect that longer subject lines get transported correctly. Is there anything I can do about it?

I checked the manual and the knowledge base but found nothing.

Thanks.

> By accident I found that there seems to be a explicit limit on the maximum length of the subject line in Mercury. When sending an
> e-mail to Mercury (tried it with MS Outlook Exchange 2007 and Thunderbird clients) that is longer than 127 characters, Mercury
> truncates it. Is this a bug or a feature? I would expect that longer subject lines get transported correctly. Is there anything I can do
> about it?

There is no 127 character Subject:  limit in Mercury since I sent the following message via Thunderbird to both a local account and a GMail account and both came through properly.  Both GMail and PMail see the entire 130 character subject line.

Received: from spooler by tstephenson.com (Mercury/32 v4.72); 23 Aug 2010 09:48:37 -0700
X-Envelope-To: <support@tstephenson.com>
X-CLAMWALL: Passed through antiviral test by ClamWall 1.4.0.96 on tstephenson.com (18)
Return-path: <techsupp@tstephenson.com>
Received: from [192.168.1.5] (192.168.1.1) by tstephenson.com (Mercury/32
 v4.72) with ESMTP ID MG0007FB; 23 Aug 2010 09:48:30 -0700
Message-ID: <4C72A65D.4050702@tstephenson.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:48:29 -0700
From: Test Support <techsupp@tstephenson.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
 rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100711 Thunderbird/3.0.6
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: support@tstephenson.com, support.stephenson@gmail.com
Subject:
 1234567-101234567-201234567-301234567-401234567-501234567-601234567-701234567-801234567-90123456-100123456-110123456-120123456-130
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Rcpt-To: <support.stephenson@gmail.com>
X-Filtered: Done
X-PMFLAGS: 34078848 0 1 Y7OYUB2S.CNM                        

130 Character subject

RFC 2822 (Internet Message Format) has a general rule for line lengths:

Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF.

A header can furthermore be "folded", i.e. be divided in several lines, so even if impractical very long subjects are allowed. Other than that there is no limitation or rule for the length of the subject header.

Mercury will, as far as I know, act according to the RFC in these cases.

/Rolf

very strange - as I mentioned, I used two different clients and sent the mails through my Mercury 4.72 installation. Every time the subject gets truncated at exactly 127 characters.So, the subject gets folded correctly after the first 78 characters but then on the second subject line it just "ends" - and even without correctly closing the current "word" (in terms of the RFC)

I also see no error in the logs or whatsoever. I'll give it a try on another machine which hosts a Mercury test server and will report what's happening with that one.

I did a quick test using Eudora as client:

Received: from spooler by foo (Mercury/32 v4.72); 24 Aug 2010 00:32:10 +0200
X-SPAMWALL: Passed through antiSPAM test by Spamhalter 4.5.1.411 on foo (15397)
X-SPAMWALL: probability - 0.0%
Received: from FOO2 (127.0.0.1) by foo (Mercury/32 v4.72) with ESMTP ID MG000001;
   24 Aug 2010 00:31:54 +0200
Message-Id: <6.2.5.6.2.20100824003000.01cb2c28@foo>
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 6.2.5.6
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:31:46 +0200
To: test@foo
From: <rolf@foo>
Subject: This Is Going To Be A Very Long Subject Line 2 This Is Going
  To Be A Very Long Subject Line 3 This Is Going To Be A Very Long
  Subject Line 4 This Is Going To Be A Very Long Subject Line 5 This Is
  Going To Be A Very Long Subject Line 6 This Is Going To Be A Very Long
  Subject Line 7 This Is Going To Be A Very Long Subject Line
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

Test

This is the message as received by Mercury. When retrieved from the mailbox using POP3 the subject line was intact.

/Rolf  

hmm - good point. We're using IMAP actually, not POP3, maybe that's the reason?

I'll do a test with POP3 as well.

Thanks so far!

Dirk