Re: [nmh-workers] inc: Unable to find a line terminator after 32768 bytes

[Ken Hornstein]

>This is the first time I've ever seen such an error from inc. In looking
>at  the message  that is  causing the  problem, apparently  it's a  MIME
>message that has a base64 encoded MIME body that is all on one line that
>even sed has a hard time parsing:

So ... yeah, that's a total violation of RFC 5322 (sendmail, for all of
it's faults, will force a newline when it encounters those huge-lined
messages, although that has it's own problems).  Nothing in MIME
supercedes any of those limits; those messages shouldn't be generated.

Well, okay, there is ONE minor exception; content which has a
Content-Transfer-Encoding of "binary" does not require a CR-LF pair
every 1000 bytes.  That doesn't apply in this case, and I have never
actually seen any binary-encoded content in the wild.  I only mention
it out of completeness.

In a perfect world I think we SHOULD parse those messages (up to the limits
of virtual memory), but right now we don't.

>Is this something I should report to  the sender as a clear violation of
>RFC5322,  which as  far as  I can  tell, restricts  line lengths  to 998
>characters, or is there something special about MIME that supersedes the
>limit and which means inc needs fixing?

Based on my personal experience ... you may not be able to find anyone
who really cares about fixing that (I have run into some people who
care about fixing broken email, most of the time I get ignored or blown
off).  Just to warn you.

--Ken